HILLS AND THE SEA 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

PARIS 

MARIE ANTOINETTE 



HILLS AND THE SEA 



BY 

HILAIRE BELLOC, M.P. 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

153-157 FIFTH AVENUE 

1906 



13 4-2,1 



First Published in igob 






TO 

THE OTHER MAN 



CONTENTS 



The North Sea . 








PAGE 
I 


The Singer 








10 


' On " Mailles " . 








15 


The Pyrenean Hive 








19 


Delft . . . . 








25 


The Wing of Dalua 








31 


On Ely . . . . 








44 


The Inn of the Margeride . 








55 


A Family of the Fens . 








69 


The Election 








82 


Arles 








87 


The Griffin 








. 93 


• The First Day's March 








102 


The Sea-Wall of the Wash 








. 118 


The Cerdagne 








130 


Carcassonne 








• 135 


Lynn 








. 141 


The Guns . ' . 








. 149 


The Looe Stream 








. 162 


' Roncesvalles 








. 169 


The Slant off the Land 








. 175 


The Canigou 






. 182 


The Man and his Wood 






^ 


, 188 



Vlll 



CONTENTS 



The Channel 

The Mowing of a Field 

The Roman Road 

The Onion-eater 

The Return to England 

The Valley of the Rother 

The Coronation . 

The Men of the Desert 

The Departure . 

The Idea of a Pilgrimage 

The Arena 

At the Sign of the Lion 

The Autumn and the Fall of Leaves 

The Good Woman 

The Harbour in the North 





PAGE 


. 


195 


, 


202 


• 


217 


. 


224 


. 


230 


. 


237 




243 


. 


247 




257 


. 


264 




271 


. 


. 285 


F Leaves 


297 


. 


302 


. 


307 



Many of these pages have appeared in the " Speaker," 
the " Pilot," the " Morning Post," the " Daily News," 
the "Pall Mall Magazine," the "Evening Standard," 
the "Morning Leader," and the "Westminster Gazette," 
to whose editors the author's best thanks are due for 
the permission to reprint them. 



THERE were once two men. They were men 
of might and breeding. They were young, 
they were intolerant, they were hale. Were there 
for humans as there is for dogs a tribunal to deter- 
mine excellence ; were there judges of anthropoidal 
points and juries to give prizes for manly race, 
vigour, and the rest, undoubtedly these two men 
would have gained the gold and the pewter medals. 
They were men absolute. 

They loved each other like brothers, yet they 
quarrelled like Socialists. They loved each other 
because they had in common the bond of man- 
kind; they quarrelled because they differed upon 
nearly all other things. The one was of the Faith, 
the other most certainly was not. The one sang 
loudly, the other sweetly. The one was stronger, 
the other more cunning. The one rode horses 
with a long stirrup, the other with a short. The 
one was indifferent to danger, the other forced 
himself at it. The one could write verse, the other 
was quite incapable thereof. The one could read 
and quote Theocritus, the other read and quoted 



X HILLS AND THE SEA 

himself alone. The high gods had given to one 
judgment, to the other valour; but to both that 
measure of misfortune which is their Gift to those 
whom they cherish. 

From this last proceeded in them both a great 
knowledge of truth and a defence of it, to the 
tedium of their friends : a devotion to the beauty 
of women and of this world ; an outspoken hatred 
of certain things and men, and, alas! a permanent 
sadness also. All these things the gods gave 
them in the day when the decision was taken upon 
Olympus that these two men should not profit by 
any great good except Friendship, and that all 
their lives through Necessity should jerk her bit 
between their teeth, and even at moments goad 
their honour. 

The high gods, which are names only to the 
multitude, visited these men. Dionysius came to 
them with all his company once, at dawn, 
upon the Surrey hills, and drove them in his car 
from a suburb whose name I forget right out into 
the Weald. Pallas Athene taught them by word 
of mouth, and the Cytherean was their rosy, warm, 
unfailing friend. Apollo loved them. He 
bestowed upon them under his own hand the 
power not only of remembering all songs, but 
even of composing light airs of their own ; and 



HILLS AND THE SEA xi 

Pan, who is hairy by nature and a lurking fellow 
afraid of others, was reconciled to their easy com- 
radeship, and would accompany them into the 
mountains when they were remote from mankind. 
Upon these occasions he revealed to them the life 
of trees and the spirits that haunt the cataracts, so 
that they heard voices calling where no one else 
had ever heard them, and that they saw stones 
turned into animals and men. 

Many things came to them in common. Once 
in the Hills, a thousand miles from home, when 
they had not seen men for a very long time, Dalua 
touched them with his wing, and they went mad 
for the space of thirty hours. It was by a stream 
in a profound gorge at evening and under a fretful 
moon. The next morning they lustrated them- 
selves with water, and immediately they were 
healed. 

At another time they took a rotten old leaky 
boat (they were poor and could afford no other) — 
they took, I say, a rotten old leaky boat whose 
tiller was loose and whose sails mouldy, and whose 
blocks were jammed and creaking, and whose 
rigging frayed, and they boldly set out together 
into the great North Sea. 

It blew a capful, it blew half a gale, it blew a 
gale : little they cared, these sons of Ares, these 



xii HILLS AND THE SEA 

cousins of the broad daylight ! There were no 
men on earth save these two who would not have 
got her under a trysail and a rag of a storm-jib 
with fifteen reefs and another : not so the heroes. 
Not a stitch would they take in. They carried all 
her canvas, and cried out to the north-east wind : 
'*We know her better than you! She'll carry 
away before she capsizes, and she'll burst long 
before she'll carry away." So they ran before it 
largely till the bows were pressed right under, and 
it was no human power that saved the gybe. They 
went tearing and foaming before it, singing a 
Saga as befitted the place and time. For it was 
their habit to sing in every place its proper song — 
in Italy a Ritornella, in Spain a Segeduilla, in 
Provence a Pastourou, in Sussex a Glee, but on 
the great North Sea a Saga. And they rolled at 
last into Orford Haven on the very tiptop of the 
highest tide that ever has run since the Noachic 
Deluge ; and even so, as they crossed the bar they 
heard the grating of the keel. That night they 
sacrificed oysters to Poseidon. 

And when they slept the Sea Lady, the silver- 
footed one, came up through the waves and kissed 
them in their sleep; for she had seen no such men 
since Achilles. Then she went back through the 
waves with all her Nereids around her to where 



HILLS AND THE SEA xiii 

her throne is, beside her old father in the depths 
of the sea. 

In their errantry they did great good. It was 
they that rescued Andromeda, though she lied, as 
a woman will, and gave the praise to her lover. 
It was they, also, who slew the Tarasque on his 
second appearance, when he came in a thunder- 
storm across the broad bridge of Beaucaire, all 
scaled in crimson and gold, forty foot long and 
twenty foot high, galloping like an angry dog 
and belching forth flames and smoke. They also 
hunted down the Bactrian Bear, who had claws 
like the horns of a cow, and of whom it is written 
in the Sacred Books of the East that : 

A Bear out of Bactria came, 

And he wandered all over the world, 
And his eyes were aglint and aflame, 
And the tip of his caudal was curled. 

Oh ! they hunted him down and they cut him up, 
and they cured one of his hams and ate it, thereby 
acquiring something of his mighty spirit. . . . 
And they it was who caught the great Devil of 
Dax and tied him up and swinged him with an 
ash-plant till he swore that he would haunt the 
woods no more. 

And here it is that you ask me for their names. 
Their names ! Their names? Why, they gave them- 



xiv HILLS AND THE SEA 

selves a hundred names : now this, now that, but 
always names of power. Thus upon that great 
march of theirs from Gascony into Navarre, one, 
on the crest of the mountains, cut himself a huge 
staff and cried loudly : 

** My name is URSUS, and this is my staff dread- 
nought : let the people in the Valley be afraid ! " 

Whereat the other cut himself a yet huger staff, 
and cried out in a yet louder voice : 

**My name is TAURUS, and this is my staff 
CRACK-SKULL : let them tremble who live in the 
Dales ! " 

And when they had said this they strode shouting 
down the mountain-side and conquered the town 
of Elizondo, where they are worshipped as gods to 
this day. Their names ? They gave themselves a 
hundred names ! 

** Well, w^ell," you say to me then, ** no matter 
about the names : what are names ? The men 
themselves concern me! . . . Tell me," you go^ 
on, ** tell me where I am to find them in the flesh, 
and converse with them. I am in haste to see 
them with my own eyes." 

It is useless to ask. They are dead. They will 
never again be heard upon the heaths at morning 
singing their happy songs : they will never more 
drink with their peers in the deep ingle-nooks of 



HILLS AND THE SEA xv 

home. They are perished. They have disap- 
peared. Alas ! The valiant fellows ! 

But lest some list of their proud deeds and 
notable excursions should be lost on earth, and 
turn perhaps into legend, or what is worse, fade 
away unrecorded, this book has been got together ; 
in which will be found now a sight they saw 
together, and now a sight one saw by himself, and 
now a sight seen only by the other. As also certain 
thoughts and admirations which the second or 
the first enjoyed, or both together : and indeed 
many other towns, seas, places, mountains, rivers, 
and men — whatever could be crammed between 
the covers. 

And there is an end of it. 



HILLS AND THE SEA 



THE NORTH SEA 

IT was on or about a Tuesday (I speak without 
boasting) that my companion and I crept in 
by darkness to the unpleasant harbour of Lowestoft. 
And I say ^* unpleasant " because, however charm- 
ing for the large Colonial yacht, it is the very devil 
for the little English craft that tries to lie there. 
Great boats are moored in the Southern Basin, 
each with two head ropes to a buoy, so that the 
front of them makes a kind of entanglement such 
as is used to defend the front of a position in war- 
fare. Through this entanglement you are told to 
creep as best you can, and if you cannot (who 
could ?) a man comes off in a boat and moors you, 
not head and stern, but, as it were, criss-cross, or 
slant-ways, so that you are really foul of the next 
berth alongside, and that in our case was a little 
steamer. 

Then when you protest that there may be a 
collision at midnight, the man in the boat says 

B 



2 HILLS AND THE SEA 

merrily, '^Oh, the wind will keep you off," as 
though winds never changed or dropped. 

I should like to see moorings done that way, at 
Cowes, say, or in Southampton Water. I should 
like to see a lot of craft laid head and tail to the 
wind with a yard between each, and, when Lord 
Isaacs protested, I should like to hear the harbour 
man say in a distant voice, ^^ Sic volo, sicjuheo " (a 
classical quotation misquoted, as is the South- 
country way), *'the wind never changes here." 

Such as it was, there it was, and trusting in the 
wind and God's providence we lay criss-cross in 
Lowestoft South Basin. The Great Bear shuffled 
round the pole and streaks of wispy clouds lay out 
in heaven. 

The next morning there was a jolly great breeze 
from the East, and my companion said, *'Let us 
put out to sea." But before I go further, let me , 
explain to you and to the whole world what vast 
courage and meaning underlay these simple words. 
In what were we to put to sea? 

This little boat was but twenty-five feet over all. 
She had lived since 1864 i^^ inland waters, mous- 
ing about rivers, and lying comfortably in mud- 
banks. She had a sprit seventeen foot outboard, 
and I appeal to the Trinity Brothers to explain what 
that means ; a sprit dangerous and horrible where 
there are waves ; a sprit that will catch every sea 
and wet the foot of your jib in the best of weathers ; 



THE NORTH SEA 8 

a sprit that weighs down already over-weighted 
bows and buries them with every plunge. Quid 
dkam? A Sprit of Erebus. And why had the 
boat such a sprit? Because her mast was so far 
aft, her forefoot so deep and narrow, her helm so 
insufficient, that but for this gigantic sprit she 
would never come round, and even as it was she 
hung in stays and had to have her weather jib- 
sheet hauled in for about five minutes before she 
would come round. So much for the sprit. 

This is not all, nor nearly all. She had about 
six inches of free-board. She did not rise at the 
bows : not she ! Her mast was dependent upon a 
fore-stay (spliced) and was not stepped, but worked 
in a tabernacle. She was a hundred and two years 
old. Her counter was all but awash. Her helm 
— I will describe her helm. It waggled back and 
forth without effect unless you jerked it suddenly 
over. Then it ^*bit," as it were, into the rudder- 
post, and she just felt it — but only just — the 
ronyon ! 

She did not reef as you and I do by sane reefing 
points, but in a gimcrack fashion with a long lace, 
so that it took half an hour to take in sail. She 
had not a jib and foresail, but just one big head- 
sail as high as the peak, and if one wanted to 
shorten sail after the enormous labour of reefing 
the mainsail (which no man could do alone) one 
had to change jibs forward and put up a storm 



4 HILLS AND THE SEA 

sail — under which (by the way) she was harder to 
put round than ever. 

Did she leak? No, I think not. It is a pious 
opinion. I think she was tight under the compo- 
sition, but above that and between wind and 
water she positively showed daylight. She was a 
basket. Glory be to God that such a boat should 
swim at all ! 

But she drew little water ? The devil she did ! 
There was a legend in the yard where she was 
built that she drew five feet four, but on a close 
examination of her (on the third time she was 
wrecked), I calculated with my companion that she 
drew little if anything under six feet. All this I 
say knowing well that I shall soon put her up for 
sale ; but that is neither here nor there. I shall 
not divulge her name. 

So we put to sea, intending to run to Harwich. 
There was a strong flood down the coast, and the 
wind was to the north of north-east. But the 
wind was with the tide — to that you owe the lives 
of the two men and the lection of this delightful 
story ; for had the tide been against the wind 
and the water steep and mutinous, you would 
never have seen either of us again : indeed we 
should have trembled out of sight for ever. 

The wind was with the tide, and in a following 
lump of a sea, without combers and with a rising 
glass, we valorously set out, and, missing the 



THE NORTH SEA 5 

South Pier by four inches, we occupied the 
deep. 

For one short half-hour things went more or less 
well. I noted a white horse or two to windward, 
but my companion said it was only the sea break- 
ing over the outer sands. She plunged a lot, but 
I flattered myself she was carrying Ccesar, and 
thought it no great harm. We had started with- 
out food, meaning to cook a breakfast when we 
were well outside : but men's plans are on the 
knees of the gods. The god called ^olus, that 
blows from the north-east of the world (you may 
see him on old maps — it is a pity they don't put 
him on the modern), said to his friends : *' I see a 
little boat. It is long since I sank one " ; and 
all together they gave chase, like Imperialists, to 
destroy what was infinitely weak. 

I looked to windward and saw the sea tumbling, 
and a great number of white waves. My heart was 
still so high that I gave them the names of the 
waves in the eighteenth Iliad \ The long-haired 
wave, the graceful wave, the wave that breaks on 
an island a long way off, the sandy wave, the 
wave before us, the wave that brings good tidings. 
But they were in no mood for poetry. They began 
to be great, angry, roaring waves, like the chiefs 
of charging clans, and though I tried to keep up 
my courage with an excellent song by Mr. New- 
bolt, ** Slung between the round shot in Nombre 



6 HILLS AND THE SEA 

Dios Bay," I soon found it useless, and pinned 
my soul to the tiller. Every sea following caught 
my helm and battered it. I hung on like a 
stout gentleman, and prayed to the seven gods 
of the land. My companion said things were no 
worse than when we started. God forgive him 
the courageous lie. The wind and the sea rose. 

It was about opposite Southwold that the danger 
became intolerable, and that I thought it could 
only end one way. Which way? The way out, 
my honest Jingoes, which you are more afraid of 
than of anything else in the world. We ran before 
it ; we were already over-canvased, and she buried 
her nose every time, so that I feared I should next 
be cold in the water, seeing England from the top 
of a wave. Every time she rose the jib let out a 
hundredweight of sea water ; the sprit buckled and 
cracked, and I looked at the splice in the forestay 
to see if it yet held. I looked a thousand times, 
and a thousand times the honest splice that I had 
poked together in a pleasant shelter under Bungay 
Woods (in the old times of peace, before ever the 
sons of the Achaians came to the land) stood the 
strain. The sea roared over the fore-peak, and 
gurgled out of the scuppers, and still we held on. 
Till (^olus blowing much more loudly, and, what 
you may think a lie, singing through the rigging, 
though we were before the wind) opposite Alde- 
burgh I thought she could not bear it any more. 



THE NORTH SEA 7 

I turned to my companion and said : ** Let us 
drive her for the shore and have done with it ; she 
cannot live in this. We will jump when she 
touches." But he, having a chest of oak, and 
bein^ bound three times with brass, said : '' Drive 
her through it. B is not often we ham such a fair 
-wind:' With these words he went below ; I hung 
on for Orfordness. The people on the strand at 
Aldeburgh saw us. An old man desired to put 
out in a boat to our aid. He danced with fear. 
The scene still stands in their hollow minds. 

As Orfordness came near, the seas that had 
hitherto followed like giants in battle now took 
to a mad scrimmage. They leapt pyramidically, 
they heaved up horribly under her ; she hardly 
obeyed her helm, and even in that gale her canvas 
flapped in the troughs. Then in despair I prayed 
to the boat itself (since nothing else could hear me), 
*'Oh, Boat," for so I was taught the vocative, 
** bear me safe round this corner, and I will scatter 
wine over your decks. " She heard me and rounded 
the point, and so terrified was I that (believe me if 
you will) I had not even the soul to remember how 
ridiculous and laughable it was that sailors should 
call this Cape of Storms *Hhe Onion." 

Once round it, for some reason I will not explain, 
but that I believe connected with my prayer, the 
sea grew tolerable. It still came onto the land (we 
could sail with the wind starboard), and the wind 



8 HILLS AND THE SEA 

blew harder yet ; but we ran before it more easily, 
because the water was less steep. We were racing 
down the long drear shingle bank of Orford, past 
what they call ^* the life-boat house" on the chart 
(there is no life-boat there, nor ever was), past the 
look-out of the coastguard, till we saw white water 
breaking on the bar of the Aide. 

Then I said to my companion, *^ There are, I 
know, two mouths to this harbour, a northern and 
a southern ; which shall we take ? " But he said, 
** Take the nearest." 

I then, reciting my firm beliefs and remember- 
ing my religion, ran for the white water. Before 
I knew well that she was round, the sea was yellow 
like a pond, the waves no longer heaved, but 
raced and broke as they do upon a beach. One 
greener, kindly and roaring, a messenger of the 
gale grown friendly after its play with us, took us 
up on its crest and ran us into the deep and calm 
beyond the bar, but as we crossed, the gravel 
ground beneath our keel. So the boat made 
harbour. Then, without hesitation, she cast her- 
self upon the mud, and I, sitting at the tiller, my 
companion ashore, and pushing at her inordinate 
sprit, but both revelling in safety, we gave thanks 
and praise. That night we scattered her decks 
with wine as I had promised, and lay easy in deep 
water within. 

But which of you who talk so loudly about the 



THE NORTH SEA 9 

island race and the command of the sea have had 
such a day ? I say to you all it does not make one 
boastful, but fills one with humility and right 
vision. Go out some day and run before it in a 
gale. You will talk less and think more ; I dis- 
like the memory of your faces. I have written 
for your correction. Read less, good people, and 
sail more ; and above all, leave us in peace. 



THE SINGER 

THE other day as I was taking my pleasure 
along a river called ^'The River of Gold," 
from which one can faintly see the enormous 
mountains which shut off Spain from Europe, as 
I walked, I say, along the Maille, or ordered and 
planted quay of the town, I heard, a long way off, 
a man singing. His singing was of that very 
deep and vibrating kind which Gascons take for 
natural singing, and which makes one think of 
hollow metal and of well-tuned bells, for it sounds 
through the air in waves ; the further it is the 
more it booms, and it occupies the whole place in 
which it rises. There is no other singing like it in 
the world. He was too far off for any words to be 
heard, and I confess I was too occupied in listening 
to the sound of the music to turn round at first and 
notice who it was that sang ; but as he gradually 
approached between the houses towards the river 
upon that happy summer morning, I left the sight 
of the houses, and myself sauntered nearer to him 
to learn more about him and his song. 

I saw a man of fifty or thereabouts, not a moun- 
taineer, but a man of the plains — tall and square, 

10 



THE SINGER 11 

large and full of travel. His face was brown like 
chestnut wood, his eyes were grey but ardent ; his 
brows were fierce, strong, and of the colour of 
shining metal, half way between iron and silver. 
He bore himself as though he were still well able 
to wrestle with younger men in the fairs, and his 
step, though extremely slow (for he was intent 
upon his song), was determined as it was deliber- 
ate. I came yet nearer and saw that he carried a 
few pots and pans and also a kind of kit in a bag : 
in his right hand was a long and polished staff of 
ashwood, shod with iron ; and still as he went he 
sang. The song now rose nearer me and more 
loud, and at last I could distinguish the words, 
which were, in English, these : 

**Men that cook in copper know well how 
difficult is the cleaning of copper. All cooking is a 
double labour unless the copper is properly tinned." 

This couplet rhymed well in the tongue he used, 
which was not Languedoc nor even Bearnais, 
but ordinary French of the north, well chosen, 
rhythmical and sure. When he had sung this 
couplet once, glancing, as he sang it, nobly up- 
wards to the left and the right at the people in 
their houses, he paused a little, set down his kit 
and his pots and his pans, and leant upon his stick 
to rest. A man in white clothes with a white 
square cap on his head ran out of a neighbouring 
door and gave him a saucepan, which he accepted 
with a solemn salute, and then, as though invigor- 



12 HILLS AND THE SEA 

ated by such good fortune, he lifted his burdens 
again and made a dignified progress of some few 
steps forward, nearer to the place in which I stood. 
He halted again and resumed his song. 

It had a quality in it which savoured at once of 
the pathetic and of the steadfast ; its few notes re- 
called to me those classical themes which conceal 
something of dreadful fate and of necessity, but 
are yet instinct with dignity and with the majestic 
purpose of the human will, and Athens would 
have envied such a song. The words were these : 

**A11 kinds of game, Izard, Quails and Wild 
Pigeon, are best roasted upon a spit ; but what 
spit is so clean and fresh as a spit that has been 
newly tinned ? " 

When he had sung this verse by way of chal- 
lenge to the world, he halted once more and 
mopped his face with a great handkerchief, wait- 
ing, perhaps, for a spit to be brought ; but none 
came. The spits of the town were new, and 
though the people loved his singing, yet they 
were of too active and sensible a kind to waste 
pence for nothing. When he saw that spits were 
not forthcoming he lifted up his kit again and 
changed his subject just by so much as might 
attract another sort of need. He sang— but now 
more violently, and as though with a worthy 

protest : Le li^vre et le lapln, 

Quand c'est bien cuit, 9a fait du bien. 

That is: **Hare and rabbit, properly cooked, 



THE SINGER 13 

do one great good," and then added after the 
necessary pause and with a gesture half of offering 
and half of disdain: '^But who can call them 
well cooked if the tinning of the pot has been 
neglected?" And into this last phrase he added 
notes which hinted of sadness and of disillusion. 
It was very fine. 

As he was now quite near me and ready, through 
the slackness of trade, to enter into a conversation, 
I came quite close and said to him, ^ ' I wish you good 
day," to which he answered, ''And I to you and 
the company," though there was no company. 

Then I said, ''You sing and so advertise your 
trade?" 

He answered, " I do. It lifts the heart, it 
shortens the way, it attracts the attention of the 
citizens, it guarantees good work." 

" In what way," said I, " does it guarantee good 
work?" 

"The man," he answered, " who sings loudly, 
clearly, and well, is a man in good health. He is 
master of himself. He is strict and well-managed. 
When people hear him they say, ' Here is a 
prompt, ready and serviceable man. He is not 
afraid. There is no rudeness in him. He is 
urbane, swift and to the point. There is method 
in this fellow.* All these things may be in the 
man who does not sing, but singing makes them 
apparent. Therefore in our trade we sing." 



14 HILLS AND THE SEA 

^* But there must be some," I said, ** who do not 
sing and who yet are good tinners." 

At this he gave a little shrug of his shoulders 
and spread down his hands slightly but impera- 
tively. '* There are such," said he. ^^They are 
even numerous. But while they get less trade 
they are also less happy men. For I would have 
you note (saving your respect and that of the 
company) that this singing has a quality. It does 
good within as well as without. It pleases the 
singer in his very self as well as brings him 
work and clients." 

Then I said, ** You are right, and I wish to God 
I had something to tin ; let me however tell you 
something in place of the trade I cannot offer you. 
All things are trine, as you have heard " (here he 
nodded), ^*and your singing does, therefore, not a 
double but a triple good. For it gives you pleasure 
within, it brings in trade and content from others, 
and it delights the world around you. It is an 
admirable thing." 

When he heard this he was very pleased. He 
took off his enormous hat, which was of straw and 
as big as a wheel, and said, ** Sir, to the next 
meeting ! " and went off singing with a happier 
and more triumphant note, *' Carrots, onions, 
lentils, and beans, depend upon the tinner for their 
worth to mankind." 



ON "MAILLES" 

A^^MAILLE" is a place set with trees in 
regular order so as to form alleys ; sand and 
gravel are laid on the earth beneath the trees, 
masonry of great solidity, grey, and exquisitely 
worked, surround the whole except on one side, 
where strong stone pillars carry heavy chains 
across the entrance. A '^Maille" takes about two 
hundred years to mature, remains in perfection for 
about a hundred more, and then, for all I know, 
begins to go off. But neither the exact moment 
at which it fails nor the length of its decline is 
yet fixed, for all ^^Mailles" date from the seven- 
teenth century at earliest, and the time when most 
were constructed was that of Charles IPs youth 
and Louis XIV's maturity — or am I wrong? 
Were these two men not much of an age? 

I am far from books ; I am up in the Pyrenees. 
Let me consider dates and reconstruct my formula. 
I take it that Charles II was more than a boy 
when Worcester was fought and when he drank 
that glass of ale at Houghton, at the ** George 
and Dragon " there, and crept along under the 
Downs to Bramber and so to Shoreham, where he 

15 



16 HILLS AND THE SEA 

took ship and was free. I take it, therefore, that 
when he came back in 1660 he must have been in 
the thirties, more or less, but how far in the 
thirties I dare not affirm. 

Now, in 1659, the year before Charles II came 
back, Mazarin signed the treaty with Spain. At 
that time Louis XIV must have been quite a 
young man. Again, he died about thirty years 
after Charles II, and he was seventy something 
when he died. 

I am increasingly certain that Charles II was 
older than Louis XIV. ... I affirm it. I feel no 
hesitation. . . . 

Lord ! How dependent is mortal man upon 
books of reference ! An editor or a minister of the 
Crown with books of reference at his elbow will 
seem more learned than Erasmus himself in the 
wilds. But let any man who reads this (and I ani 
certain five out of six have books of reference by 
them as they read), I say, let any man who reads 
this ask himself whether he would rather be where 
he is, in London, on this August day (for it is 
August) or where I am, which is up in Los Altos, 
the very high Pyrenees, far from every sort of 
derivative and secondary thing and close to all 
things primary? 

I will describe this place. It is a forest of beech 
and pine ; it grows upon a mountain-side so steep 
that only here and there is there a ledge on which 



ON "MAILLES " 17 

to camp. Great precipices of limestone diversify 
the wood and show through the trees, tall and 
white beyond them. One has to pick one's way 
very carefully along the steep from one night's 
camp to another, and often one spends whole 
hours seeking up and down to turn a face of rock 
one cannot cross. 

It seems dead silent. There are few birds, and 
even at dawn one only hears a twittering here and 
there. Swirls of cloud form and pass beneath one 
in the gorge and hurry up the opposing face of the 
ravine ; they add to this impression of silence : and 
the awful height of the pines and the utter remote- 
ness from men in some way enhance it. Yet, 
though it seems dead silent, it is not really so, and 
if you were suddenly put here from the midst 
of London, you would be confused by a noise 
which we who know the place continually forget — 
and that is the waterfalls. 

All the way down the gorge for miles, sawing 
its. cut in sheer surfaces through the rock, crashes 
a violent stream, and all the valley is full of its 
thunder. But it is so continuous, so sedulous, 
that it becomes part of oneself. One does not lose 
it at night as one falls asleep, nor does one recover 
it in the morning, when dreams are disturbed by 
a little stir of life in the undergrowth and one 
opens one's eyes to see above one the bronze of the 
dawn, 
c 



18 HILLS AND THE SEA 

It possesses one, does this noise of the torrent, 
and when, after many days in such a wood, I pick 
my way back by marks I know to a ford, and 
thence to an old shelter long abandoned, and 
thence to the faint beginnings of a path, and thence 
to the high road and so to men ; when I come 
down into the plains I shall miss the torrent and 
feel ill at ease, hardly knowing what I miss, 
and I shall recall Los Altos, the high places, and 
remember nothing but their loneliness and silence. 

I shall saunter in one of the towns of the plain, 
St. Girons or another, along the riverside and 
under the lime trees . . . which reminds me of 
**Mailles"! Little pen, little fountain pen, little 
vagulous, blandulous pen, companion and friend, 
whither have you led me, and why cannot you 
learn the plodding of your trade ? 



THE PYRENEAN HIVE 

SHUT in between two of the greatest hills in 
Europe — hills almost as high as Etna, and 
covering with their huge bases half a county of 
land — there lies, in the Spanish Pyrenees, a little 
town. It has been mentioned in books very rarely, 
and visited perhaps more rarely. Of three men 
whom in my life I have heard speak its name, two 
only had written of it, and but one had seen it. 
Yet to see it is to learn a hundred things. 

There is no road to it. No wheeled thing has 
ever been seen in its streets. The crest of the 
Pyrenees (which are here both precipitous and 
extremely high) is not a ridge nor an edge, but a 
great wall of slabs, as it were, leaning up against 
the sky. Through a crack in this wall, between 
two of these huge slabs, the mountaineers for 
many thousand years have wormed their way across 
the hills, but the height and the extreme steepness 
of the last four thousand feet have kept that 
passage isolated and ill-known. Upon the French 
side the path has recently been renewed ; within a 
few yards upon the southern slope it dwindles and 
almost disappears. 

19 



20 HILLS AND THE SEA 

As one so passes from the one country to the 
other, it is for all the world like the shutting of a 
door between oneself and the world. For some 
reason or other the impression of a civilization 
active to the point of distress, follows one all up 
the pass from the French railway to the summit of 
the range ; but when that summit is passed the 
new and brilliant sun upon the enormous glaciers 
before one, the absence of human signs and of 
water, impress one suddenly with silence. 

From that point one scrambles down and down 
for hours into a deserted valley — all noon and 
afternoon and evening : on the first flats a rude 
path at last appears. A river begins to flow ; great 
waterfalls pour across one's way, and for miles 
upon miles one limps along and down the valley 
across sharp boulders such as mules go best on, 
and often along the bed of a stream, until at night-, 
fall — if one has started early and has put energy 
into one's going, and if it is a long summer day — 
then at nightfall one first sees cultivated fields — 
patches of oats not half an acre large hanging 
upon the sides of the ravine wherever a little shelf 
of soil has formed. 

So went the Two Men upon an August evening, 
till they came in the half-light upon something 
which might have been rocks or might have been 
ruins — grey lumps against the moon : they were 
the houses of a little town. A sort of gulf, winding 



THE PYRENEAN HIVE 21 

like a river gorge, and narrower than a column of 
men, was the street that brought us in. But just 
as we feared that we should have to grope our way 
to find companionship we saw that great surprise 
of modern mountain villages (but not of our own 
in England) — a little row of electric lamps hang- 
ing from walls of an incalculable age. 

Here, in this heap of mountain stones, and led 
by this last of inventions, we heard at last the 
sound of music, and knew that we were near an 
inn. The Moors called (and call) an inn Fundouk ; 
the Spaniards call it a Fonda. To this Fonda, 
therefore, we went, and as we went the sound of 
music grew louder, till we came to a door of oak 
studded with gigantic nails and swung upon 
hinges which, by their careful workmanship and 
the nature of their grotesques, were certainly of 
the Renaissance. Indeed, the whole of this 
strange hive of mountain men was a mixture — 
ignorance, sharp modernity, utter reclusion : bar- 
baric. Christian ; ruinous and enduring things. 
The more recent houses had for the most part their 
dates marked above their doors. There were some 
of the sixteenth century, and many of the seven- 
teenth, but the rest were far older, and bore no 
marks at all. There was but one house of our own 
time, and as for the church, it was fortified with 
narrow windows made for arrows. 

Not only did the Moors call an inn a Fundouk, 



22 HILLS AND THE SEA 

but also they lived (and live) not on the ground 
floor, but on the first floor of their houses : so after 
them the Spaniards. We came in from the street 
through those great oaken doors, not into a room, 
but into a sort of barn, with a floor of beaten earth ; 
from this a stair (every banister of which was 
separately carved in a dark wood) led up to the 
storey upon which the inn was held. There was 
no hour for the meal. Some were beginning to 
eat, some had ended. When we asked for food it 
was prepared, but an hour was taken to prepare it, 
and it was very vile ; the wine also was a wine 
that tasted as much of leather as of grapes, and 
reminded a man more of an old saddle than of 
vineyards. 

The people who put this before us had in their 
faces courage, complete innocence, carelessness, 
and sleep. They spoke to us in their language 
(I understood it very ill) of far countries^ which 
they did not clearly know — they hardly knew 
the French beyond the hills. As no road led into 
their ageless village, so did no road lead out of it. 
To reach the great cities in the plain, and the 
railway eighty miles away, why, there was the 
telephone. They slept at such late hours as they 
chose ; by midnight many were still clattering 
through the lane below. No order and no law 
compelled them in anything. 

The Two Men were asleep after this first astonish- 



THE PYRENEAN HIVE 23 

ing glimpse of forgotten men and of a strange 
country. In the stifling air outside there was a 
clattering of the hoofs of mules and an argument 
of drivers. A long way off a man was playing a 
little stringed instrument, and there was also in 
the air a noise of insects buzzing in the night heat. 
When all of a sudden the whole place awoke to 
the noise of a piercing cry which but for its 
exquisite tone might have been the cry of pain, so 
shrill was it and so coercing to the ear. It was 
maintained, and before it fell was followed by a 
succession of those quarter-tones which only the 
Arabs have, and which I had thought finally 
banished from Europe. To this inhuman and 
appalling song were set loud open vowels rather 
than words. 

Of the Two Men, one leapt at once from his bed 
crying out, **This is the music ! This is what I 
have desired to hear ! " For this is what he had 
once been told could be heard in the desert, when 
first he looked out over the sand from Atlas : but 
though he had travelled far, he had never heard it, 
and now he heard it here, in the very root of 
these European hills. It was on this account that 
he cried out, ''This is the music ! " And when he 
had said this he put on a great rough cloak and 
ran to the room from which the song or cry pro- 
ceeded, and after him ran his companion. 

The Two Men stood at the door behind a great 



24 HILLS AND THE SEA 

mass of muleteers, who all craned forward to where, 
upon a dais at the end of the room, sat a Jewess 
who still continued for some five minutes this 
intense and terrible effort of the voice. Beside her 
a man who was not of her race urged her on as 
one urges an animal to further effort, crying out, 
**Hap! Hap!" and beating his palms together 
rhythmically and driving and goading her to the 
full limit of her power. 

The sound ceased suddenly as though it had 
been stabbed and killed, and the woman whose 
eyes had been strained and lifted throughout as in 
a trance, and whose body had been rigid and 
quivering, sank down upon herself and let her eye- 
lids fall, and her head bent forward. 

There was complete silence from that moment 
till the dawn, and the second of the Two Men said 
to the first that they had had an experience not so . 
much of music as of fire. 



DELFT 

DELFT is the most charming town in the 
world. It is one of the neat cities : trim, 
small, packed, self-contained. A good woman in 
early middle age, careful of her dress, combed, 
orderly, not without a sober beauty — such a woman 
on her way to church of a Sunday morning is not 
more pleasing than Delft. It is on the verge of 
monotony, yet still individual ; in one style, yet 
suggesting many centuries of activity. There is 
a full harmony of many colours, yet the memory 
the place leaves is of a united, warm and generous 
tone. Were you suddenly put down in Delft you 
would know very well that the vast and luxuriant 
meadows of Holland surrounded it, so much are 
its air, houses, and habits those of men inspired 
by the fields. 

Delft is very quiet, as befits a town so many 
of whose streets are ordered lanes of water, yet 
one is inspired all the while by the voices of 
children, and the place is strongly alive. Over 
its sky there follow in stately order the great white 
clouds of summer, and at evening the haze is lit 

25 



26 HILLS AND THE SEA 

just barely from below with that transforming 
level light which is the joy and inspiration of the 
Netherlands. Against such an expanse stands up 
for ever one of the gigantic but delicate belfries, 
round which these towns are gathered For 
Holland, it seems, is not a country of villages, 
but of compact, clean towns, standing scattered 
over a great waste of grass like the sea. 

This belfry of Delft is a thing by itself in 
Europe, and all these truths can be said of it by a 
man who sees it for the first time : first, that its 
enormous height is drawn up, as it were, and 
enhanced by every chance stroke that the instinct 
of its slow builders lit upon ; for these men of the 
infinite flats love the contrast of such pinnacles, 
and they have made in the labour of about a 
thousand years a landscape of their own by build- 
ing, just as they have made by ceaseless labour a 
rich pasture and home out of those solitary marshes 
of the delta. 

Secondly, that height is enhanced by something 
which you will not see, save in the low countries 
between the hills of Ardennes and the yellow seas 
— I mean brick Gothic ; for the Gothic which you 
and I know is built up of stone, and, even so, 
produces every effect of depth and distance ; but 
the Gothic of the Netherlands is often built 
curiously of bricks, and the bricks are so thin 
that it needs a whole host of them in an infinity 



DELFT 27 

of fine lines to cover a hundred feet of wall. They 
fill the blank spaces with their repeated detail ; 
they make the style (which even in stone is full 
of chances and particular corners) most intricate, 
and — if one may use so exaggerated a metaphor — 
'* populous." Above all, they lead the eye up 
and up, making a comparison and measure of 
their tiny bands until the domination of a buttress 
or a tower is exaggerated to the enormous. Now 
the belfry of Delft, though all the upper part is of 
stone, yet stands on a great pedestal (as it were) 
of brick — a pedestal higher than the houses. And 
in this base are pierced two towering, broad and 
single ogives, empty and wonderful and full 
of that untragic sadness which you may find 
also in the drooping and wide eyes of extreme 
old age. 

Thirdly, the very structure of the thing is bells. 
Here the bells are more than the soul of a Chris- 
tian spire ; they are its body too, its whole self. 
An army of them fills up all the space between the 
delicate supports and framework of the upper 
parts ; for I know not how many feet, in order, 
diminishing in actual size and in the perspective 
also of that triumphant elevation, stand ranks on 
ranks of bells from the solemn to the wild, from 
the large to the small ; a hundred or two hundred 
or a thousand. There is here the prodigality 
of Brabant and Hainaut and the Batavian blood, 



28 HILLS AND THE SEA 

a generosity and a productivity in bells without 
stint, the man who designed it saying: ''Since 
we are to have bells, let us have bells : not measured 
out, calculated, expensive, and prudent bells, but 
careless bells, self-answering multitudinous bells; 
bells without fear, bells excessive and bells innumer- 
able ; bells worthy of the ecstasies that are best 
thrown out and published in the clashing of bells. 
For bells are single, like real pleasures, and we 
will combine such a great number that they shall 
be like the happy and complex life of a man. In 
a word, let us be noble and scatter our bells 
and reap a harvest till our town is famous for its 
bells." So now all the spire is more than clothed 
with them ; they are more than stuff' or ornament ; 
they are an outer and yet sensitive armour, all 
of bells. 

Nor is the wealth of these bells in their number 
only, but also in their use ; for they are not reserved 
in any way, but ring tunes and add harmonies at 
every half and quarter and at all the hours both by 
night and by day. Nor must you imagine that 
there is any obsession of noise through this ; they 
are far too high and melodious, and, what is more, 
too thoroughly a part of all the spirit of Delft to 
be more than a perpetual and half-forgotten im- 
pression of continual music ; they render its air 
sacred and fill it with something so akin to an 
uplifted silence as to leave one — when one has 



DELFT 29 

passed from their influence — asking what balm 
that was which soothed all the harshness of sound 
about one. 

Round that tower and that voice the town hangs 
industrious and subdued — a family. Its waters, 
its intimate canals, its boats for travel, and its 
slight plashing of bows in the place of wheels, 
entered the spirit of the traveller and gave him for 
one long day the Right of Burgess. In autumn, 
in the early afternoon — the very season for those 
walls — it was easy for him to be filled with a 
restrained but united chorus, the under-voices 
of the city, droning and murmuring perpetually 
of Peace and of Labour and of the wild rose — 
Content. . . . 

Peace, labour, and content — three very good 
words, and summing up, perhaps, the goal of all 
mankind. Of course, there is a problem every- 
where, and it would be heresy to say that the 
people of Delft have solved it. It is Matter of 
Breviary that the progress of our lives is but 
asymptotic to true joy ; we can approach it nearer 
and nearer, but we can never reach it. 

Nevertheless, I say that in this excellent city, 
though it is outside Eden, you may, when the 
wind is in the right quarter, receive in distant and 
rare appeals the scent and air of Paradise ; the 
soul is filled. 

To this emotion there corresponds and shall here 



30 HILLS AND THE SEA 

be quoted a very noble verse, which runs — or 
rather glides — as follows : — 

Satiety, that momentary flower 

Stretched to an hour — 

These are her gifts which all mankind may use, 

And all refuse. 

Or words to that effect. And to think that you 
can get to a place like that for less than a pound ! 



THE WING OF DALUA 

TIME was, and that not so long ago, when the 
Two Men had revealed to them by their 
Genius a corner of Europe wherein they were 
promised more surprises and delights than in any 
other. 

It was secretly made known to them that in this 
place there were no pictures, and that no one had 
praised its people, and further that no Saint had 
ever troubled it ; and the rich and all their evils (so 
the two men were assured) had never known the 
place at all. 

It was under the influence of such a message 
that they at once began walking at great speed 
for the river which is called the River of Gold, and 
for the valleys of Andorra ; and since it seemed 
that other men had dared to cross the Pyrenees 
and to see the Republic, and since it seemed also, 
according to books, records and what not, that 
may have been truth or may have been lies, that 
common men so doing went always by one way, 
called the Way of Hospitalet, the Two Men deter- 
mined to go by no such common path, but to march, 

31 



32 HILLS AND THE SEA 

all clothed with power, in a straight line, and to 
take the main range of the mountains just where 
they chose, and to come down upon the Andorrans 
unexpectedly and to deserve their admiration and 
perhaps their fear. 

They chose, therefore, upon the map the valley 
of that torrent called the Aston, and before it was 
evening, but at an hour when the light of the 
sun was already very ripe and low they stood 
under a great rock called Guie, which was all of 
bare limestone with fa9ades as bare as the Yose- 
mite, and almost as clean. They looked up at this 
great rock of Guie and made it the terminal of 
their attempt. I was one and my companion was 
the other : these were the two men who started out 
before a sunset in August to conquer the high 
Pyrenees. Before me was a very deep valley full of 
woods, and reaching higher and higher perpetu- 
ally so that it reminded me of Hyperion ; but as for 
my companion, it reminded him of nothing, for he 
said loudly that he had never seen any such things 
before and had never believed that summits of so 
astonishing a height were to be found on earth. 
Not even at night had he imagined such appal- 
ling upward and upward into the sky, and this he 
said though he had seen the Alps, of which it is 
true that when you are close to them they are very 
middling affairs ; but not so the Pyrenees, which 
are not only great but also terrible, for they are 



THE WING OF DALUA 33 

haunted, as you shall hear. But before I begin to 
write of the spirits that inhabit the deserts of the 
Aston, I must first explain, for the sake of those 
who have not seen them, how the awful valleys of 
the Pyrenees are made. 

All the high valleys of mountains go in steps, 
but those of the Pyrenees in a manner more 
regular even than those of the Sierra Nevada out 
in California, which the Pyrenees so greatly re- 
semble. For the steps here are nearly always 
three in number between the plain and the main 
chain, and each is entered by a regular gate of 
rock. So it is in the valley of the Ariege, and so 
it is in that of the Aston, and so it is in every other 
valley until you get to the far end where live the 
cleanly but incomprehensible Basques. Each of 
these steps is perfectly level, somewhat oval in 
shape, a mile or two or sometimes five miles long, 
but not often a mile broad. Through each will run 
the river of the valley, and upon either side of it 
there will be rich pastures, and a high plain of this 
sort is called SLjasse, the same as in California is 
called a ^^flat": as ** Dutch Flat," ^'Poverty 
Flat," and other famous flats. 

First then will come a great gorge through 
which one marches up from the plain, and then at 
the head of it very often a waterfall of some kind, 
along the side of which one forces one's way up 
painfully through a narrow chasm of rock and finds 

D 



34 HILLS AND THE SEA 

above one the great green level of the first jasse 
with the mountains standing solemnly around it. 
And then when one has marched all along this 
level one will come to another gorge and another 
chasm, and when one has climbed over the barrier 
of rock and risen up another 2000 feet or so, one 
comes to a second jasse, smaller as a rule than the 
lower one ; but so high are the mountains that all 
this climbing into the heart of them does not seem 
to have reduced their height at all. And then 
one marches along this second jasse and one comes 
to yet another gorge and climbs up just as one did 
the two others, ' through a chasm where there will 
be a little waterfall or a large one, and one finds at 
the top the smallest and most lonely of the jasses. 
This often has a lake in it. The mountains round 
it will usually be cliffs, forming sometimes a perfect 
ring, and so called cirques, or, by the Spaniards, 
cooking-pots ; and as one stands on the level floor 
of one such last highest jasse and looks up at the 
summit of the cliffs, one knows that one is looking 
at the ridge of the main chain. Then it is one's 
business, if one desires to conquer the high 
Pyrenees, to find a sloping place up the cliffs to 
reach their summits and to go down into the 
further Spanish valleys. This is the order of the 
Pyrenean dale, and this was the order of that of 
the Aston. 

Up the gorge then we went, my companion and 



THE WING OF DALUA 35 

I ; the day fell as we marched, and there was a 
great moon out, filling the still air, when we came 
to the first chasm, and climbing through it saw 
before us, spread with a light mist over its pastures, 
the first jasse under the moonlight. And up we 
went, and up again, to the end of the second jasse, 
having before us the vast wall of the main range, 
and in our hearts a fear that there was something 
unblessed in the sight of it. For though neither I 
told it to my companion nor he to me, we had both 
begun to feel a fear which the shepherds of these 
mountains know very well. It was perhaps mid- 
night or a little more when we made our camp, 
after looking in vain for a hut which may once 
have stood there, but now stood no longer. We 
lit a fire, but did not overcome the cold, which 
tormented us throughout the night, for the wind 
blew off the summits ; and at last we woke from 
our half-sleep and spent the miserable hours in 
watching the Great Bear creeping round the pole, 
and in trying to feed the dying embers with damp 
fuel. And there it was that I discovered what I 
now make known to the world, namely, that gorse 
and holly will burn of themselves, even while they 
are yet rooted in the ground. So we sat sleepless 
and exhausted, and not without misgiving, for we 
had meant that night before camping to be right 
under the foot of the last cliffs, and we were yet 
many miles away. We were glad to see the river 



36 HILLS AND THE SEA 

at last in the meadows show plainly under the 
growing light, the rocks turning red upon the sky- 
Kne, and the extinction of the stars. As we so 
looked north and eastward the great rock of Guie 
stood up all its thousands of feet enormous against 
the rising of the sun. 

We were very weary, and invigorated by nothing 
but the light, but, having that at least to strengthen 
us, we made at once for the main range, knowing 
very well that, once we were over it, it would be 
downhill all the way, and seeing upon our maps 
that there were houses and living men high in the 
further Andorran valley, which was not deserted 
like this vale of the Aston, but inhabited : full, that 
is, of Catalans, who would soon make us forget the 
inhuman loneliness of the heights, for by this time 
we were both convinced, though still neither of us 
said it to the other, that there was an evil brooding 
over all this place. 

It was noon when, after many hours of broken 
marching and stumbling, which betrayed our weak- 
ness, we stood at last beside the tarn in which the 
last cliffs of the ridge are reflected, and here was a 
steep slope up which a man could scramble. We 
drank at the foot of it the last of our wine and ate 
the last of our bread, promising ourselves refresh- 
ment, light, and peace immediately upon the 
further side, and thus lightened of our provisions, 
and with more heart in us, we assaulted the final 



THE WING OF DALUA 37 

hill ; but just at the summit, where there should 
have greeted us a great view over Spain, there 
lowered upon us the angry folds of a black cloud, 
and the first of the accidents that were set in order 
by some enemy to ruin us fell upon my companion 
and me. 

For a storm broke, and that with such violence 
that we thought it would have shattered the bare 
hills, for an infernal thunder crashed from one 
precipice to another, and there flashed, now close 
to us, now vividly but far off, in the thickness of 
the cloud, great useless and blinding glares of 
lightning, and hailstones of great size fell about 
us also, leaping from the bare rocks like marbles. 
And when the rain fell it was just as though it had 
been from a hose, forced at one by a pressure 
instead of falling, and we two on that height were 
the sole objects of so much fury, until at last my 
companion cried out from the rock beneath which 
he was cowering, **This is intolerable !" And I 
answered him, from the rock which barely covered 
me, ^' It is not to be borne ! " So in the midst of 
the storm we groped our way down into the valley 
beneath, and got below the cloud ; and when we 
were there we thought we had saved the day, for 
surely we were upon the southern side of the hills, 
and in a very little while we should see the first 
roofs of the Andorrans. 

For two doubtful hours we trudged down that 



38 HILLS AND THE SEA 

higher valley, but there were no men, nor any 
trace of men except this, that here and there the 
semblance of a path appeared, especially where the 
valley fell rapidly from one stage to another over 
smooth rocks, which, in their least dangerous 
descent, showed by smooth scratches the passage 
of some lost animal. For the rest, nothing human 
nor the memory of it was there to comfort us, 
though in one place we found a group of cattle 
browsing alone without a master. There we sat 
down in our exhaustion and confessed at last what 
every hour had inwardly convinced us of with 
greater strength, that we were not our own masters, 
that there was trouble and fate all round us, that 
we did not know what valley this might be, and 
that the storm had been but the beginning of an 
unholy adventure. We had been snared into 
Fairyland. 

We did not speak much together, for fear of 
lowering our hearts yet more by the confession one 
to the other of the things we knew to be true. We 
did not tell each other what reserve of courage 
remained to us, or of strength. We sat and looked 
at the peaks immeasurably above us, and at the 
veils of rain between them, and at the black back- 
ground of the sky. Nor was there anything in the 
landscape which did not seem to us unearthly and 
forlorn. 

It was, in a manner, more lonely than had been 



THE WING OF DALUA 39 

the very silence of the further slope : there was 
less to comfort and support the soul of a man ; 
but with every step downward we were penetrated 
more and more with the presence of things not 
mortal and of influences to which any desolation 
was preferable. At one moment voices called to 
us from the water, at another we heard our names, 
but pronounced in a whisper so slight and so 
exact that the more certain we were of hearing 
them the less did we dare to admit the reality of 
what we had heard. In a third place we saw 
twice in succession, though we were still going 
forward, the same tree standing by the same stone : 
for neither tree nor stone was natural to the good 
world, but each had been put there by whatever 
was mocking us and drawing us on. 

Already had we stumbled twice and thrice the 
distance that should have separated us from the 
first Andorran village, but we had seen nothing, 
not a wall, nor smoke from a fire, let alone the 
tower of a Christian church, or the houses of 
men. Nor did any length of the way now make 
us wonder more than we had already wondered, 
nor did we hope, however far we might proceed, 
that we should be saved unless some other influ- 
ence could be found to save us from the unseen 
masters of this place. For by this time we had 
need of mutual comfort, and openly said it to 
one another — but in low tones — that the valley 



40 HILLS AND THE SEA 

was Faery. The river went on calling to us all 
the while. In places it was full of distant cheering, 
in others crowded with the laughter of a present 
multitude of tiny things, and always mocking us 
with innumerable tenuous voices. It grew to be 
evening. It was nearly two days since we had 
seen a man. 

There stood in the broader and lower part of 
the valley to which we had now come, numerous 
rocks and boulders ; for our deception some one 
of them or another would seem to be a man. I heard 
my companion call suddenly, as though to a 
stranger, and as he called I thought that he had 
indeed perceived the face of a human being, and 
I felt a sort of sudden health in me when I heard 
the tone of his voice ; and when I looked up I 
also saw a man. We came towards him and he 
did not move. Close up beside his form we put 
out our hands : but what we touched was a rough 
and silent stone. 

After that we spoke no more. We went on 
through the gathering twilight, determined to 
march downwards to the end, but knowing pretty 
well what the end would be. Once only did we 
again fall into the traps that were laid about us, 
when we went and knocked at the hillside where 
we thought we had seen a cottage and its oaken 
door, and after the mockery of that disappointment 
we would not be deceived again, nor make our- 



THE WING OF DALUA 41 

selves again the victims of the laughter that per- 
petually proceeded from the torrent. 

The path led us onwards in a manner that was 
all one with the plot now woven round our feet. 
We could but follow the path, though we knew with 
what an evil purpose it was made: that it was as 
phantom as the rest. At one place it invited us to 
cross, upon two shaking pine trunks, the abyss of a 
cataract ; in another it invited us to climb, in spite 
of our final weariness, a great barrier of rock that 
lay between an upper and a lower jasse. We 
continued upon it determinedly, with heads bent, 
barely hoping that perhaps at last we should emerge 
from this haunted ground, but the illusions which 
had first mocked us we resolutely refused. So much 
so, that where at one place there stood plainly before 
us in the gathering darkness a farm-house with its 
trees and its close, its orchard and its garden gate, 
I said to my companion, ** All this place is cursed, 
and I will not go near." And he applauded me, 
for he knew as well as I that if we had gone a few 
steps towards that orchard and that garden close, 
they would have turned into the bracken of the hill- 
side, bare granite and unfruitful scree. 

The main range, where it appeared in revela- 
tions behind us through the clouds, was far higher 
than mountains ever seem to waking men, and 
it stood quite sheer as might a precipice in a 
dream. The forests upon either side ran up until 



42 HILLS AND THE SEA 

they were lost miles and miles above us in the 

storm. 

Night fell and we still went onward, the one 

never daring to fall far behind the other, and once 

or twice in an hour calling to each other to make 

sure that another man was near ; but this we did 

not continue, because as we went on each of us 

became aware under the midnight of the presence 

of a Third. 

• . • . . • ' 

There was a place where the path, now broad 
and plain, approached a sort of little sandy bay 
going down towards the stream, and there I saw, 
by a sudden glimpse of the moon through the 
clouds, a large cave standing wide. We went 
down to it in silence, we gathered brushwood, we 
lit a fire, and we lay down in the cave. But before 
we lay down I said to my companion: **I have 
seen the moon — she is in the north. Into what 
place have we come? " He said to me in answer : 
** Nothing here is earthly," and after he had said 
this we both fell into a profound sleep in which 
we forgot not only cold, great hunger and fatigue, 
but our own names and our very souls, and passed, 
as it were, into a deep bath of forgetful n ess. 

When we woke at the same moment, it was dawn. 

We stood up in the clear and happy light and 

found that everything was changed. We poured 

water upon our faces and our hands, strode out a 



THE WING OF DALUA 43 

hundred yards and saw again the features of a 
man. He had a kind face of some age, and eyes 
such as are the eyes of mountaineers, which seem 
to have constantly contemplated distant horizons 
and wide plains beneath their homes. We heard 
as he came up the sound of a bell in a Christian 
church below, and we exchanged with him the 
salutations of living men. Then I said to him : 
** What day is this?" He said *' Sunday," and a 
sort of memory of our fear came on us, for we had 
lost a day. 

Then I said to him : ** What river are we upon, 
and what valley is this ? " 

He answered : ** The river and the valley of the 
Aston." And what he said was true, for as we 
rounded a corner we perceived right before us a 
barrier, that rock of Guie from which we had set 
out. We had come down again into France, and 
into the very dale by which we had begun our 
ascent. 

But what that valley was which had led us from 
the summits round backward to our starting-place, 
forcing upon us the refusal of whatever powers 
protect this passage of the chain, I have never been 
able to tell. It is not upon the maps ; by our 
description the peasants knew nothing of it. No 
book tells of it. No men except ourselves have 
seen it, and I am willing to believe that it is not of 
this world. 



ON ELY 

THERE are two ways by which a man may 
acquire any kind of learning or profit, and 
this is especially true of travel. 

Everybody knows that one can increase what 
one has of knowledge or of any other possession 
by going outwards and outwards ; but what is 
also true, and what people know less, is that one 
can increase it by going inwards and inwards. 
There is no goal to either of these directions, nor 
any term to your advantage as you travel in them. 

If you will be extensive, take it easy; the infi- 
nite is always well ahead of you, and its symbol is 
the sky. 

If you will be intensive, hurry as much as you 
like you will never exhaust the complexity of 
things ; and the truth of this is very evident in a 
garden, or even more in the nature of insects ; of 
which beasts I have heard it said that the most 
stolid man in the longest of lives would acquire 
only a cursory knowledge of even one kind, as, 
for instance, of the horned beetle, which sings so 
angrily at evening. 



ON ELY 45 

You may travel for the sake of great horizons, 
and travel all your life, and fill your memory with 
nothing but views from mountain-tops, and yet 
not have seen a tenth of the world. Or you may 
spend ;your life upon the religious history of East 
Rutland, and plan the most enormous book upon 
it, and yet find that you have continually to excise 
and select from the growing mass of your material. 

• ••••• 

A wise man having told me this some days 
before (and I having believed it), it seemed to me 
as though a new entertainment had been invented 
for me, or rather as though I had found a bottom- 
less purse ; since by this doctrine there was mani- 
festly no end to the number of my pleasures, and 
to each of this infinite number no possibility of 
exhaustion ; but I thought I would put it to the 
test in this way : putting aside but three days, I 
determined in that space to explore a little corner 
of this country. 

Now, although I saw not one-hundredth of the 
buildings or the people in this very small space, 
and though I knew nothing of the birds or the 
beasts or the method of tillage, or of anything of 
all that makes up a land, yet I saw enough to fill 
a book. And the pleasure of my thoughts was so 
great that I determined to pick out a bit here and 
a bit there, and to put down the notes almost with- 
out arrangement, in order that those who cannot 



46 HILLS AND THE SEA 

do these things (whether from lack of leisure or 
for some other reason) may get some part of my 
pleasure without loss to me (on the contrary, with 
profit) ; and in order that every one may be con- 
vinced of what this little journey finally taught me, 
and which I repeat — that there is an inexhaust- 
ible treasure everywhere, not only outwards, but 
inwards. 

I had known the Ouse — (how many years ago !) 
— I had looked up at those towers of Ely from my 
boat ; but a town from a river and a town from the 
street are two different things. Moreover, in that 
time I speak of, the day years ago, it was blowing 
very hard from the south, and I was anxious to be 
away before it, and away I went down to Lynn at 
one stretch ; for in those days the wind and the 
water seemed of more moment than old stones. 
Now (after how many years !) it was my business 
to go up by land, and as I went, the weight of the 
Cathedral filled the sky before me. 

Impressions of this sort are explained by every 
man in his own way — for my part I felt the Norman. 

I know not by what accident it was, but never 
had I come so nearly into the presence of the men 
who founded England. The isolation of the hill, 
the absence of clamour and false noise and every- 
thing modern, the smallness of the village, the 
solidity and amplitude of the homes and their 
security, all recalled an origin. 



ON ELY 47 

I went into the door of the Cathedral under the 
high tower. I noted the ponderous simplicity of 
the great squat pillars, the rough capitals — plain 
bulges of stone without so much as a pattern cut 
upon them — the round arch and the low aisles ; 
but in one corner remaining near the door — a 
baptistery, I suppose — was a crowd of ornament 
which (like everything of that age) bore the mark 
of simplicity, for it was an endless heap of the 
arch and the column and the zigzag ornament-r- 
the broken line. Its richness was due to nothing 
but the repetition of similar forms, and everywhere 
the low stature, the muscles, the broad shoulders 
of the thing, proved and reawoke the memory of 
the Norman soldiers. 

They have been written of enough to-day, but 
who has seen them from close by or understood 
that brilliant interlude of power? 

The little bullet-headed men, vivacious, and 
splendidly brave, we know that they awoke all 
Europe, that they first provided settled financial 
systems and settled governments of land, and that 
everywhere, from the Grampians to Mesopotamia, 
they were like steel when all other Christians were 
like wood or like lead. 

We know that they were a flash. They were 
not formed or definable at all before the year looo ; 
by the year 1200 they were gone. Some odd 
transitory phenomenon of cross-breeding, a very 



48 HILLS AND THE SEA 

lucky freak in the history of the European family, 
produced the only body of men who all were lords 
and who in their collective action showed con- 
tinually nothing but genius. 

We know that they were the spear-head, as it 
were, of the Gallic spirit : the vanguard of that 
one of the Gallic expansions which we associate 
with the opening of the Middle Ages and with 
the Crusades. . . . We know all this and write 
about it ; nevertheless, we do not make enough of 
the Normans in England. 

Here and there a man who really knows his 
subject and who disdains the market of the school 
books, puts as it should be put their conquest of 
this island and their bringing into our blood what- 
ever is still strongest in it. Many (descended 
from their leaders) have remarked their magical 
ride through South Italy, their ordering of Sicily, 
their hand in Palestine. As for the Normans in 
Normandy, of their exchequer there, of what 
Rouen was — all that has never been properly 
written down at all. Their great adventure here 
in England has been most written of by far ; but I 
say again no one has made enough of them ; no 
one has brought them back out of their graves. 
The character of what they did has been lost in 
these silly little modern quarrels about races, 
which are but the unscholarly expression of a 
deeper hypocritical quarrel about religion. 



ON ELY 49 

Yet it is in England that the Norman can be 
studied as he can be studied nowhere else. He 
did not write here (as in Sicily) upon a palimpsest. 
He was not merged here (as in the Orient) with the 
rest of the French. He was segregated here ; he 
can be studied in isolation ; for though so many 
that crossed the sea on that September night with 
William, the big leader of them, held no Norman 
tenure, yet the spirit of the whole thing was 
Norman : the regularity, the suddenness, the 
achievement, and, when the short fighting was 
over, the creation of a new society. It was the 
Norman who began everything over again — the 
first fresh influence since Rome. 

The riot of building has not been seized. The 
island was conquered in 1070. It was a place of 
heavy foolish men with random laws, pale eyes, 
and a slow manner ; their houses were of wood : 
sometimes they built (but how painfully, and how 
childishly !) with stone. There was no height, 
there was no dignity, there was no sense of perma- 
nence. The Norman Government was established. 
At once rapidity, energy, the clear object of a 
united and organized power followed. And see 
what followed in architecture alone, and in what a 
little space of the earth, and in what a little stretch 
of time — less than the time that separates us to- 
day from the year of Disraeli's death or the occu- 
pation of Egypt. 



50 HILLS AND THE SEA 

The Conquest was achieved in 1070. In that 
same year they pulled down the wooden shed at 
Bury St. Edmunds, '* unworthy," they said, ''of a 
great saint," and began the great shrine of stone. 
Next year it was the castle at Oxford, in 1075 
Monkswearmouth, Jarrow, and the church at 
Chester ; in 1077 Rochester and St. Albans ; in 
1079 Winchester. Ely, Worcester, Thorney, Hur- 
ley, Lincoln followed with the next years ; by 1089 
they had tackled Gloucester, by 1092 Carlisle, by 
1093 Lindisfarne, Christchurch— tall Durham. . . . 
And this is but a short and random list of some 
of their greatest works in the space of one boy- 
hood. Hundreds of castles, houses, village churches 
are unrecorded. 

Were they not indeed a people? . . . And all 
that effort realized itself before Pope Urban had 
made the speech which launched the armies against 
the Holy Land. The Norman had created and 
founded all this before the Mass of Europe was 
urged against the flame of the Arab, to grow 
fruitful and to be transformed. 

One may say of the Norman preceding the 
Gothic what Dante said of Virgil preceding the 
Faith : Would that they had been born in a time 
when they could have known it ! But the East 
was not yet open. The mind of Europe had not 
yet received the great experience of the Crusades ; 
the Normans had no medium wherein to express 



ON ELY 51 

their mighty soul, save the round arch and the 
straight line, the capital barbaric or naked, the 
sullen round shaft of the pillar — more like a drum 
than like a column. They could build, as it were, 
with nothing but the last ruins of Rome. They 
were given no forms but the forms which the 
fatigue and lethargy of the Dark Ages had repeated 
for six hundred years. They were capable, even 
in the north, of impressing even these forms with 
a superhuman majesty. 

• ••••• 

Was I not right in saying that everywhere in 
the world one can look in and in and never find an 
end to one's delight? I began to explore but a 
tiny corner of England, and here in one corner 
of that corner and in but one thought arising 
from this corner of a corner I have found these 

things. 

• • • • • • 

But England is especially a garden of this sort, 
or a storehouse ; and in nothing more than in this 
matter of the old architecture which perpetuates 
the barbaric grandeur of the eleventh century — the 
time before it was full day. 

When the Gothic came the whole of northern 
Europe was so enamoured of it that common men, 
bishops, and kings pulled down and rebuilt every- 
where. Old crumbling walls of the Romanesque 



52 HILLS AND THE SEA 

fell at Amiens ; you can still see them cowering at 
Beauvais ; only an accident of fire destroyed them in 
No+1-e Dame. In England the transition survived; 
nowhere save in England is the northern Roman- 
esque triumphant, not even at Caen. Elsewhere 
the Gothic has conquered. Only here in England 
can you see the Romanesque facing, like an equal, 
newer things, because here only was there a great 
outburst of building — a kind of false spring before 
the Gothic came, because here only in Europe had 
a great political change and a great flood of wealth 
come in before the expansion of the twelfth century 
began. 

There, is one little corner of England ; here is 
another. 

The Isle of Ely lying on the fens is like a star- 
fish lying on a flat shore at low tide. Southward, 
westward, and northward from the head or centre 
of the clump (which is where the Cathedral stands) 
it throws out arms every way, and these arms have 
each short tentacles of their own. In between the 
spurs runs the even fen like a calm sea, and on the 
crest of the spurs, radiating also from Ely, run 
the roads. Long ago there was but one road of 
these that linked up the Isle with the rest of 
England. It was the road from the south, and 
there the Romans had a station ; the others led 
only to the farms and villages dependent upon the 



ON ELY 53 

city. Now they are prolonged by artifice into the 
modern causeways which run over the lower and 
new-made land. 

The Isle has always stood like a fortress, and 
has always had a title and a commandership, 
which once were very real things ; the people told 
me that the King of England's third title was 
Marquis of Ely, and I knew of myself that just 
before the civil wars the commandership of the 
Isle gave the power of raising men. 

The ends of many wars drifted to this place to 
die. Here was the last tur.i of the Saxon lords, 
and the last rally of the feudal rebellions of the 
thirteenth century. 

Not that the fens were impassable or homeless, 
but they were difficult in patches ; their paths were 
rare and laid upon no general system. Their 
inhabited fields were isolated, their waters tidal, 
with great banks of treacherous mud, intricate 
and unbridged ; such conditions are amply suffi- 
cient for a defensive war. The flight of a small 
body in such a land can always baffle an army 
until that small body is thrust into some one 
refuge so well defended by marsh or river that the 
very defence cuts off retreat : and a small body so 
brought to bay in such a place has this further 
advantage, that from the bits of higher land, the 
* islands," one of the first requirements of defence 
is afforded— an unbroken view of every avenue 



54 HILLS AND THE SEA 

by which attack can come. There is no surprising 
such forts. 

• ••••• 

So much is in Ely to-day and a great deal more. 
For instance (a third and last idea out of the 
thousand that Ely arouses), Ely is dumb and yet 
oracular. The town and the hill tell you nothing 
till you have studied them in silence and for some 
considerable time. This boast is made by many 
towns, that they hold a secret. But Ely, which is 
rather a village than a town, has alone a true 
claim. The proof of which is this, that no one 
comes to Ely for a few hours and carries anything 
away, whereas no man lives in Ely for a year 
without beginning to write a book. I do not say 
that all are published, but I swear that all are 
begun. 



THE INN OF THE MARGERIDE 

WHATEVER, keeping its proportion and 
form, is designed upon a scale much 
greater or much less than that of our general 
experience, produces upon the mind an effect of 
phantasy. 

A little perfect model of an engine or a ship 
does not only amuse or surprise. It rather casts 
over the imagination something of that veil through 
which the world is transfigured, and which I have 
called ^'the wing of Dalua"; the medium of appre- 
ciations beyond experience ; the medium of vision, 
of original passion and of dreams. The principal 
spell of childhood returns as we bend over the 
astonishing details. We are giants — or there is 
no secure standard left in our intelligence. 

So it is with the common thing built much 
larger than the million examples upon which we 
had based our petty security. It has been always 
in the nature of worship that heroes, or the gods 
made manifest, should be men, but larger than 
men. Not tall men or men grander, but men 
transcendent : men only in their form ; in their 
dimension so much superior as to be lifted out 

55 



56 HILLS AND THE SEA 

of our world. An arch as old as Rome but not 
yet ruined, found on the sands of Africa, arrests 
the traveller in this fashion. In his modern cities 
he has seen greater things ; but here in Africa, 
where men build so squat and punily, cowering 
under the heat upon the parched ground, so noble 
and so considerable a span, carved as men can 
carve under sober and temperate skies, catches the 
mind, and clothes it with a sense of the strange. 
And of these emotions the strongest, perhaps, is 
that which most of those who travel to-day go 
seeking ; the enchantment of mountains : the air 
by which we know them for something utterly 
different from high hills. Accustomed to the con- 
tour of downs and tors, or to the valleys and long 
slopes that introduce a range, we come to some 
wider horizon and see, far off, a further line of 
hills. To hills all the mind is attuned : a mod'^^rate 
ecstasy. The clouds are above the hills, lying 
level in the empty sky ; men and their ploughs 
have visited, it seems, all the land about us. Till, 
suddenly, faint but hard, a cloud less varied, a 
greyer portion of the infinite sky itself, is seen to 
be permanent above the world. Then all our 
grasp of the wide view breaks down. We change. 
The valleys and the tiny towns, the unseen mites 
of men, the gleams or threads of roads, are pros- 
trate, covering a little watching space before the 
shrine of this dominant and towering presence. 



THE INN OF THE MARGERIDE 57 

It is as though humanity were permitted to 
break through the vulgar illusion of daily sense, 
and to learn in a physical experience how unreal 
are all the absolute standards by which we build. 
It is as though the vast and the unexpected had a 
purpose, and that purpose were the showing to 
mankind in rare glimpses what places are de- 
signed for the soul— those ultimate places where 
things common become shadows and fail, and the 
divine part in us, which adores and desires, 
breathes its own air, and is at last alive. 

• ••«•• 

This awful charm which attaches to the enormous 
envelops the Causse of Mende ; for its attributes 
are all of them pushed beyond the ordinary limit. 

Each of the four Gausses is a waste ; but the 
Causse of Mende is utterly bereft of men. Each 
is a high plateau ; but this, I believe, the highest 
in feet, and certainly in impression. You stand 
there as it were upon the summit of a lonely 
pedestal, with nothing but a rocky edge around 
you. Each is dried up ; but the Causse of Mende 
is without so much as a dew-pan or a well ; it is 
wrinkled, horny, and cauterized under the alter- 
nate frost and flame of its fierce open sky, as are 
the deserts of the moon. Each of the Causses is 
silent ; but the silence of the Causse of Mende is 
scorched and frozen into its stones, and is as old as 
they; all around, the torrents which have sawn 



58 HILLS AND THE SEA 

their black canons upon every side of the block 
frame this silence with their rumble. Each of the 
Gausses casts up above its plain fantastic heaps of 
rock consonant to the wild spirit of its isolation ; 
but the Causse of Mende holds a kind of fortress — 
a medley so like the ghost of a dead town that, 
even in full daylight, you expect the footsteps of 
men ; and by night, as you go gently, in fear of 
waking the sleepers, you tread quite certainly 
among built houses and spires. This place the 
peasants of the canons have called **The Old 
City " ; and no one living will go near it who 
knows it well. 

The Gausses have also this peculiar to them : 
that the ravines by which each is cut off are steep 
and sudden. But the cliffs of the Gausse of Mende 
are walls. That the chief of these walls may seem 
the more terrible, it is turned northward, so that 
by day and night it is in shadow, and falls sheer. 

• m • • • • 

It was when I had abandoned this desolate won- 
der (but with its influence strong upon me) that I 
left the town of Mende, down on the noise of its 
river, and began to climb the opposing mountain 
of the Margeride. 

It was already evening, though as yet there 
were no stars. The air was fresh, because the 
year was at that season when it is summer in the 
vineyard plains, but winter in the hills. A twi- 



THE INN OF THE MARGERIDE 59 

light so coloured and translucent as to suggest 
cold spanned like an Aurora the western mouth of 
the gully. Upon my eastward and upward way 
the full moon, not yet risen, began to throw an 
uncertain glory over the sky. 

This road was made by the French Kings when 
their influence had crept so far south as to control 
these mountains. They became despots, and their 
despotism, which was everywhere magnificent, 
engraved itself upon these untenanted bare rocks. 
They strengthened and fortified the road. Its 
grandeur in so empty and impoverished a land was 
a boast or a threat of their power. The Republic 
succeeded the kings, the Armies succeeded the 
Republic, and every experiment succeeded the vic- 
tories and the breakdown of the Armies. The road 
grew stronger all the while, bridging this desert, 
and giving pledge that the brain of Paris was 
able, and more able, to order the whole of the 
soil. So then, as I followed it, it seemed to me to 
bear in itself, and in its contrast with untamed 
surroundings, the history and the character of this 
one nation out of the many which live by the 
tradition of Europe. As I followed it and saw its 
exact gradient, its hard and even surface, its square 
border stones, and, every hundred yards, its carved 
mark of the distance done, these elaborations, 
standing quite new among the tumbled rocks of a 
vague upland, made one certain that Paris had 



60 HILLS AND THE SEA 

been at work. Very far back (how far was marked 
on the milestone) the road had left the swarming 
gate of Toulouse. Very far on (how far was 
marked on the milestone) it was to cross the Saone 
by its own bridge, and feed the life of Lyons. In 
between it met and surmounted (still civilized, 
easy, and complete) this barbaric watershed of the 
Margeride. 

As I followed it, law — good law and evil — seemed 
to go with me up the mountain side. 

There was more sound than on the arid wastes 
of the Causse. There were trees, and birds in the 
trees, moving faintly. The great moon, which had 
now risen, shone also upon scanty grass and (from 
time to time) upon the trickle of water passing in 
runnels beneath the road. 

The torrent in the depth below roared openly 
and strong, and, beyond it, the black wall of the 
Causse, immense and battlemented above me under 
the moon, made what poor life this mountain sup- 
ported seem for a moment gracious by comparison. 
I remembered that sheep and goats and men cQuld 
live on the Margeride. 

But the Margeride has rightly compelled its very 
few historians to melancholy or fear. 

It is a district, or a mountain range, or a single 
summit, which cuts off the east from the west, the 
Loire from the Gironde : a long even barrow of 
dark stone. Its people are one, suspicious of the 



THE INN OF THE MARGERIDE 61 

plains. Its line against the sky is also one : no 
critical height in Europe is so strict and unbroken. 
You may see it from a long way east — from the 
Velay, or even from the last of the Forez, and 
wonder whether it is land or a sullen bar of black 
cloud. 

All the world knows how snow, even in mere 
gullies and streaks, uplifts a mountain. Well, I 
have seen the dull roof-tile of the Margeride from 
above Puy in spring, when patches of snow still 
clung to it, and the snow did no more than it would 
have done to a plain. It neither raised nor dis- 
tinguished this brooding thing. 

But it is indeed a barrier. Its rounded top is 
more formidable than if it were a ridge of rock ; 
its saddle, broad and indeterminate, deceives the 
traveller, with new slight slopes following one upon 
the other when the sharp first of the ascent is done. 

Already the last edge of the Causse beyond the 
valley had disappeared, and already had the great 
road taken me higher than the buttress which holds 
up that table-land, when, thinking I had gained 
the summit, I turned a corner in the way and found 
a vague roll of rising land before me. Upon this 
also, under the strong moonlight, I saw the ruin 
of a mill. Water, therefore, must have risen 
behind it. I expected and found yet another un- 
certain height, and beyond it a third, and, a mile 
beyond, another. This summit was like those 



62 HILLS AND THE SEA 

random marshy steps which rise continually and 
wearily between the sluggish rivers of the prairies. 

I passed the fields that gave his title to La Pey- 
rouse. The cold, which with every hundred feet 
had increased unnoticed, now first disturbed me. 
The wind had risen (for I had come to that last 
stretch of the glacis, over which from beyond the 
final height, an eastern wind can blow), and this 
wind carried I know not what dust of ice, that did 
not make a perceptible fall, yet in an hour covered 
my clothes with tiny spangles, and stung upon the 
face like Highland snow in a gale. With that 
wind and that fine powdery frost went no apparent 
clouds. The sky was still clear above me. Such 
rare stars as can conquer the full moon shone 
palely ; but round the moon herself bent an 
evanescent halo, like those one sees over the 
Channel upon clear nights before a stormy morur 
ing. The spindrift of fine ice had, I think, defined 
this halo. 

How long I climbed through the night I do not 
know. The summit was but a slight accident 
upon a tumbled plain. The ponds stood thick 
with ice, the sound of running water had ceased, 
when the slight downward of the road through a 
barren moor and past broad undrained films of 
frozen bog, told me that I was on the further 
northern slope. The wind also was now roaring 
over the platform of the watershed, and great 



THE INN OF THE MARGERIDE 63 

patches of whirling snow lay to the right and left 
like sand upon the grassy dunes of a coast. 

Through all this loneliness and cold I went 
down, with the great road for a companion. 
Majesty and power were imposed by it upon these 
savage wilds. The hours uncalculated, and the 
long arrears of the night, had confused my atten- 
tion ; the wind, the little arrows of the ice, the 
absence of ploughlands and of men. Those 
standards of measure which (I have said) the 
Gausses so easily disturb would not return to me. 
I took mile after mile almost unheeding, numbed 
with cold, demanding sleep, but ignorant of where 
might be found the next habitation. 

It was in this mood that I noted on a distant 
swirl of rocks before me what might have been 
roofs and walls ; but in that haunted country the 
rocks play such tricks as I have told. The moon- 
light also, which seems so much too bright upon a 
lonely heath, fails one altogether when distinction 
must be made between distant things, and when 
men are near. I did not know that these rocks (or 
houses) were the high group of Chateauneuf till I 
came suddenly upon the long and low house 
which stands below it on the road, and is the 
highway inn for the mountain town beyond. 

I halted for a moment, because no light came 
from the windows. Just opposite the house a 
great tomb marked the fall of some hero. The 



64 HILLS AND THE SEA 

wind seemed less violent. The waters of the marshy 
plain had gathered. They were no longer frozen, 
and a little brook ran by. As I waited there, hesi- 
tating, my fatigue came upon me, and I knocked at 
their great door. They opened, and light poured 
upon the road, and the noise of peasants talking 
loudly, and the roaring welcome of a fire. In this 
way I ended my crossing of these sombre and un- 
recorded hills. 

• •**•• 

I that had lost count of hours and of heights in 
the glamour of the midnight and of the huge 
abandoned places of my climb, stepped now into 
a hall where the centuries also mingled and lost 
their order. The dancing fire filled one of those 
great pent-house chimneys that witness to the 
communal life of the Middle Ages. Around and 
above it, ironwork of a hundred years branched, 
from the inglenooks to support the drying meats 
of the winter provision. A wide board, rude, over- 
massive, and shining with long usage, reflected 
the stone ware and the wine. Chairs, carved gro- 
tesquely, and as old almost as the walls about me, 
stood round the comfort of the fire. I saw that 
the windows were deeper than a man's arms could 
reach, and wedge-shaped — made for fighting. I 
saw that the beams of the high roof, which the fire- 
light hardly caught, were black oak and squared 
enormously, like the ribs of a master-galley, and in 



THE INN OF THE MARGERIDE 65 

the leaves and garden things that hung from them, 
in the mighty stones of the wall, and the beaten 
earth of the floor, the strong simplicity of our past, 
and the promise of our endurance, came upon me. 
The peasants sitting about the board and fire 
had risen, looking at the door ; for strangers were 
rare, and it was very late as I came out of the 
empty cold into that human room. Their dress 
was ancestral ; the master, as he spoke to me, 
mixed new words with old. He had phrases that 
the Black Prince used when he went riding at 
arms across the Margeride. He spoke also of 
modern things, of the news in the valley from 
which I had come, and the railway and Puy below 
us. They put before me bread and wine, which I 
most needed. I sat right up against the blaze. 
We all talked high together of the things we 
knew. For when I had told them what news there 
was in the valley, they also answered my questions, 
into which I wove as best I could those still living 
ancient words I had caught from their mouths. I 
asked them whose was that great tomb under the 
moonlight, at which I had shuddered as I entered 
their doors. They told me it was Duguesclin's 
tomb ; for he got his death-wound here under the 
walls of the town above us five hundred years ago, 
and in this house he had died. Then I asked 
what stream that was which trickled from the half- 
frozen moss, and led down the valley of my next 



66 HILLS AND THE SEA 

day's journey. They told me it was called the 
River Red-cap, and they said that it was Faery. 
I asked them also what was the name of the height 
over which I had come ; they answered, that the 
shepherds called it ^^The King's House," and that 
hence, in clear weather, under an eastern wind, 
one could see far off, beyond the Velay, that 
lonely height which is called *^ The Chair of God." 

So we talked together, drinking wine and 
telling each other of many things, I of the world 
to which I was compelled to return, and they of 
the pastures and the streams, and all the story of 
Lozere. And, all the while, not the antiquity 
alone, but the endurance, of Christendom poured 
into me from every influence around. 

They rose to go to the homes which were their 
own, without a lord. We exchanged the last 
salutations. The wooden soles of their shoes 
clattered upon the stone threshold of the door. 

The master also rose and left me. I sat there 
for perhaps an hour, alone, with the falling fire 
before me and a vision in my heart. 

Though I was here on the very roof and centre 
of the western land, I heard the surge of the inner 
and the roll of the outer sea; the foam broke 
against the Hebrides, and made a white margin 
to the cliffs of Holy Ireland. The tide poured up 
beyond our islands to the darkness in the north. 
I saw the German towns, and Lombardy, and the 



THE INN OF THE MARGERIDE 67 

light on Rome. And the great landscape I saw 
from the summit to which I was exalted was not 
of to-day only, but also of yesterday, and perhaps 
of to-morrow. 

Our Europe cannot perish. Her religion — which 
is also mine — has in it those victorious energies of 
defence which neither merchants nor philosophers 
can understand, and which are yet the prime 
condition of establishment. Europe, though she 
must always repel attacks from within and from 
without, is always secure; the soul of her is a 
certain spirit, at once reasonable and chivalric. 
And the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it. 

She will not dissolve by expansion, nor be 
broken by internal strains. She will not sufifer 
that loss of unity which would be for all her 
members death, and for her history and meaning 
and self an utter oblivion. She will certainly 
remain. 

Her component peoples have merged and have 
remerged. Her particular, famous cities have 
fallen down. Her soldiers have believed the 
world to have lost all, because a battle turned 
against them, Hittin or Leipsic. Her best has at 
times grown poor, and her worst rich. Her colo- 
nies have seemed dangerous for a moment from 
the insolence of their power, and then again (for 
a moment) from the contamination of their de- 
cline. She has suffered invasion of every sort; 



68 HILLS AND THE SEA 

the East has wounded her in arms and has 
corrupted her with ideas; her vigorous blood has 
healed the wounds at once, and her permanent 
sanity has turned such corruptions into innocuous 
follies. She will certainly remain. 

• • . • • ' • 

So that old room, by its very age, reminded me, 
not of decay, but of unchangeable things. 

All this came to me out of the fire; and upon 
such a scene passed the pageantry of our astounding 
history. The armies marching perpetually, the 
guns and ring of bronze; I heard the chaunt of 
our prayers. And, though so great a host went 
by from the Baltic to the passes of the Pyrenees, 
the myriads were contained in one figure common 
to them all. 

I was refreshed, as though by the resurrection 
of something loved and thought dead. I was no 
longer afraid of Time. 

That night I slept ten hours. Next day, as 1 
swung out into the air, I knew that whatever Power 
comforts men had thrown wide open the gates of 
morning ; and a gale sang strong and clean across 
that pale blue sky which mountains have for a 
neighbour. 

I could see the further valley broadening among 
woods, to the warmer places; and I went down 
beside the River Red-cap onwards, whither it 
pleased me to go. 



A FAMILY OF THE FENS 

UPON the very limit of the Fens, not a hundred 
feet in height, but very sharp against the 
level, there is a lonely little hill. From the edge 
of that hill the land seems very vague ; the flat 
line of the horizon is the only boundary, and that 
horizon mixes into watery clouds. No country- 
side is so formless until one has seen the plan of 
it set down in a map, but on studying such a map 
one understands the scheme of the Fens. 

The Wash is in the shape of a keystone with 
the narrow side towards the sea and the broad side 
towards the land. Imagine the Wash prolonged 
for twenty or thirty miles inland and broadened 
considerably as it proceeded as would a curving 
fan, or better still, a horseshoe, and you have the 
Fens : a horseshoe whose points, as Dugdale says^ 
are the corners of Lincolnshire and Norfolk. 

All around them is land of some little height, 
and quite dry. It is oolitic on the east, chalky on 
the south ; and the old towns and the old roads 
look from all round this amphitheatre of dry land 
down upon the alluvial flats beneath. Peterboro*, 

69 



70 HILLS AND THE SEA 

Cambridge, Lynn, are all just off the Fens, and the 
Ermine street runs on the bank which forms their 
eastern frontier. 

This plain has suffered very various fortunes. 
How good the land was and how well inhabited 
before the ruin of the monasteries is not yet 
completely grasped, even by those who love these 
marshes and who have written their history. Yet 
there is physical evidence of what was once here ; 
masses of trees but just buried, grass lying mown 
in swathes beneath the moss-land, the implements 
of men where now no men can live, the great 
buried causeway running right across from east to 
west. 

Beyond such proofs there are the writers who, 
rare as are the descriptions of medieval scenery, 
manage to speak of this. For Henry of Hunting- 
don it was a kind of garden. There were many 
meres in it, but there were also islands and woods 
and orchards. William of Malmesbury writes of 
it with delight, and mentions even its vines. 
The meres were not impassable marshes ; for 
instance, in Domesday you find the Abbot of 
Ramsey owning a vessel upon Whittlesea Mere. 
The whole impression one gets from the earlier 
time is that of something like the upper waters of 
the rivers in the Broads : much draining and a 
good many ponds, but most of the land firm with 
good deep pastures and a great diversity of woods. 



A FAMILY OF THE FENS 71 

Great catastrophes have certainly overcome this 
countryside. The greatest was the anarchy of the 
sixteenth century ; but it is probable that, coinci- 
dently with every grave lesion in the continuity 
of our civilization, the Fens suffered, for they 
always needed the perpetual attention of man to 
keep them (as they so long were, and may be again 
if ever our people get back their land and restore 
a communal life) fully inhabited, afforested, and 
cultured. 

It is probable that the break-up of the ninth 
century saw the Fens partly drowned, and that 
after the Black Death something of the same 
sort happened again, for it is in the latter fourteenth 
and fifteenth centuries that you begin to hear of a 
necessity for reclaiming them. John of Gaunt had 
a scheme, and Morton dug a ditch which is still 
called * * Morton's Leam. " I say, every defeat of our 
civilization was inflicted here in the Fens, but it is 
certain that the principal disaster followed the sup- 
pression of the monasteries. 

These great foundations — nourishing hundreds 
and governing thousands, based upon the popu- 
lace, drawn from the populace, and living by the 
common life — were scattered throughout the Fens. 
They were founded on the ** islands" nearest the 
good land : Thorney, Ramsay, Croyland, Ely — the 
nuns of Chatteris. 

They dated from the very beginning. Ely was 



72 HILLS AND THE SEA 

founded within sight of our conversion, 672. Croy- 
land came even before that, before civilization and 
religion were truly re-established in Britain ; 
Penda's great-nephew gave it its charter ; St. 
Augustine had been dead for little more than 
a century when the charter was signed. Even as 
the monks came to claim their land they discovered 
hermits long settled there. Thorney — Ancarig it 
was then — was even fifty years older than Croyland. 
The roots of all these go back to the beginning 
of the nation. 

Ramsay and Chatteris cannot be traced beyond 
the gulf of the Danish invasion, but they are 
members of the group or ring of houses which 
clustered round the edge of the dry land and sent 
out its industry towards the Wash, making new 
land ; for this ring sent out feelers eastward, drain- 
ing the land and recovering it every way, founding 
cells, establishing villages. Holbeach, Spalding, 
Freiston, Holland, and I know not how much 
more was their land. 

When the monasteries were destroyed their 
lordship fell into the hands of that high class — 
now old, then new — the Cromwells and Russells 
and the rest, upon whom has since depended the 
greatness of the country. The intensive spirit 
proper to a teeming but humble population was 
forgotten. The extensive economics of the great 
owners, their love of distances and of isolation 



A FAMILY OF THE FENS 73 

took the place of the old agriculture. Within a 
generation the whole land was drowned. 

The isolated villages forgot the general civiliza- 
tion of England ; they came to depend for their 
living upon the wildfowl of the marshes ; here and 
there was a little summer pasturing, more rarely a 
little ploughing of the rare patches of dry land ; but 
the whole place soon ran wild, and there English- 
men soon grew to cause an endless trouble to the 
new landlords. These, all the while on from the 
death of Henry to that of Elizabeth, pursued their 
vigilance and their accumulations. Their power 
rose above the marshes like a slow sun and dried 
them up at last. 

In every inch of England you can find the 
history of England. You find it very typically 
here. The growth of that leisured class which we 
still enjoy — the class that in the seventeenth cen- 
tury destroyed the central government of the 
Crown, penetrated and refreshed the universities, 
acquired for its use and reformed the endowed 
primary education of the English, and began a 
thorough occupation of our public land — the 
growth of that leisured class is nowhere more 
clearly to be seen than in the history of the Fens, 
since the Fens had their faith removed from them. 

Here is the story of one such family, a family 
without whose privileges and public services it 
would be difficult to conceive modern England. 



74 HILLS AND THE SEA 

Their wealth is rooted in the Fens ; the growth of 
that wealth is parallel to the growth of every for- 
tune by which we are governed. 

When the monasteries were despoiled and their 
farms thrown open to a gamble, when the water ran 
in again, the countryside and all its generations of 
human effort were drowned, there was raised up 
for the restoration of this land the family of 
Russell. 

The Abbey of Thorney had been given to these 
little squires. They were in possession when, 
towards the end of Elizabeth's reign, in 1600, was 
passed the General Draining Act. It was a gener- 
ous and a broad Act : it was to apply not only to 
the Great Level, but to all the marshes of the 
realm. It was soon bent to apply to the family. 

Seven years later a Dutchman of the name of 
Cornelius Vermuyden was sent for, that the work . 
might be begun. For fifty years this man dug and 
intrigued. He was called in to be the engineer ; 
he had the temerity to compete with the new land- 
lords ; he boasted a desire — less legitimate in an 
alien than in a courtier — to make a great fortune 
rapidly. He was ruined. 

All the adventurers who first attempted the 
draining of the Fens were ruined — but not that 
permanent Russell-Francis, the Earl of Bedford, 
surnamed **the Incomparable." 

The story of Vermuyden by him is intricate, 



A FAMILY OF THE FENS 75 

but every Englishman now living on another man's 
land should study it. Vermuyden was to drain 
the Great Level and to have 95,000 acres for his 
pains. These acres were in the occupation — for 
the matter of that, in great part the ownership— of 
a number of English families. It is true the land 
had lain derelict for seventy years, bereft of capital 
since the Reformation, and swamped. It is true 
that the occupiers (and owners) were very poor. 
It is true, therefore, that they could not properly 
comprehend a policy that was designed for the 
general advantage of the country. They only un- 
derstood that the hunting and fishing by which 
they lived were to stop ; that their land was to be 
very considerably improved and taken from them. 
In their ignorance of ultimate political good they 
began to show some considerable impatience. 

The cry of the multitude has a way of taking on 
the forms of stupidity. The multitude in this case 
cried out against Vermuyden. They objected to 
a foreigner being given so much freehold. ** In 
an anguish of despair" — to use one chronicler's 
words — *'they threw themselves under the protec- 
tion of a leader." That leader was, of course, 
Francis, Earl of Bedford, surnamed **the Incom- 
parable." He could not hear unmoved the cry of 
his fellow-citizens. He yielded to their petition, 
took means to oust the Dutchmen, and imme- 
diately obtained for himself the grant of the 



76 HILLS AND THE SEA 

95,000 acres, by a royal order of 13 January, 
1630-31, known as **the Lynn Law." 

When he saw the extent of the land and of the 
water upon it, even his tenacious spirit was 
alarmed. He therefore associated with himself in 
the expenses thirteen others, all persons of rank 
and fortune, as was fitting : alone of the fourteen 
he preserved his fortune. 

The fourteen, then, began the digging of nine 
drains (if we include the repair of Morton's 
Leam) ; the largest was that fine twenty-one miles 
called the old Bedford River, and Charles I, 
tliough all in favour of so great a work, was all in 
dread of the power it might give to the class 
which — as his prophetic conscience told him — was 
destined to be his ruin. 

There was a contract that the work should be 
finished in six years : when the six years were 
ended it was very far from finished. The King 
grumbled ; but Francis, Earl of Bedford, belonged 
to a clique already half as powerful as the Crown. 
He threatened, and a new royal order gave him 
an extension of time. It was the second of his 
many victories. 

The King refused to forget his defeat, and 
Francis, Earl of Bedford, began to show that 
hatred of absolute government which has made of 
his kind the leaders of a happy England. The 
King did a Stuart thing — he lost his temper. He 



A FAMILY OF THE FENS 77 

said, **You may keep your 95,000 acres, but I 
shall tax them '* ; and he did. Francis, Earl of 
Bedford, felt in him a growing passion for just 
government. He already spoke of freedom ; but 
he had no leisure wherein to enjoy it, for within 
two years he departed this life, of the small-pox, 
leaving to his son William the legacy of the great 
battle for liberty and for the public land. 

This change in the Bedford dynasty coincided 
with the Civil Wars. William Russell, having 
led some of the Parliamentary forces at Edge 
Hill, was so uncertain which side might ulti- 
mately be victorious as to open secret negotia- 
tions with the King. Nothing happened to him, 
nor even to his brother, who intrigued later 
against Cromwell's life. He was at liberty to 
return once more and to survey from the walls of 
the old abbey the drowned land upon which he 
had set his heart. 

The work of digging could not be carried on 
during the turmoil of the time; William, Earl of 
Bedford, filled his leisure in the framing of an 
elaborate bill of costs. It was dated 20 May, 
1646, and showed the sums which he had spent 
and which had been wasted in the failure to re- 
claim the Fens. He stated them at over ^^90,000, 
and to this he added, like a good business man, 
interest at the rate of 8 per cent, for so many 
years as to amount to more than another ;f30,ooo. 



78 HILLS AND THE SEA 

As against the King, the trick was a good one ; 
but, like many another financier, William, Earl 
of Bedford, was shortsighted. The more anxious 
the King grew to pay out public money to the 
Russells, the less able he grew to do so, till at last 
he lost not only the shadow of power over the 
treasury, but life itself; and William, Earl of 
Bedford, brought in his bill to the Common- 
wealth. 

Cromwell was of the same class, and knew the 
trick too well. He gave the family leave to pro- 
secute their digging to forget their demand for 
money. The Act was passed at noon. Bedford 
was sent for at seven o'clock the next morning 
and ordered to attend upon Cromwell "and make 
thankful acknowledgments." He did so. 

The works began once more. The common 
people, in their simplicity, rose as they had so 
often risen before, against a benefit they could not 
comprehend ; but they no longer had a Stuart to 
deal with. To their extreme surprise they were 
put down ** with the aid of the military." Then, 
for all the world as in the promotion of a modern 
company, the consulting engineer of the original 
promoters reappears. The Russells had patched 
it up with Vermuyden, and the work was resumed 
a third time. 

There was, however, this difficulty, that though 
Englishmen might properly be constrained at this 



A FAMILY OF THE FENS 79 

moment to love an orderly and godly life, and to 
relinquish their property when it was to the public 
good that they should do so, yet it would have 
been abhorrent to the whole spirit of the Com- 
monwealth to enslave them even for a work of 
national advantage. A labour difficulty arose, 
and the works were in grave peril. 

Those whose petty envy may be pleased at the 
entanglement of William, Earl of Bedford, have 
forgotten the destiny which maintains our great 
families. In the worst of the crisis, the battle of 
Dunbar was fought ; i66 Scotch prisoners (and 
later 500 more) were indentured out to dig the 
ditches, and it was printed and posted in the end 
of 165 1 that it was ** death without mercy" for any 
to attempt to escape. 

The respite was not for long. Heaven, as 
though to try the patience of its chosen agent, 
raised up a new obstacle before the great patriot. 
Peace was made, and the Scotch prisoners were 
sent home. It was but the passing frown which 
makes the succeeding smiles of the Deity more 
gracious. At that very moment Blake was defeat- 
ing the Dutch upon the seas, and these excellent 
prisoners, laborious, and (by an accident which 
clearly shows the finger of Divine providence) 
especially acquainted with the digging of ditches, 
arrived in considerable numbers, chained, and 
handed over to the service of the Premier House. 



80 HILLS AND THE SEA 

At the same time it was ordered by the Lord Pro- 
tector that when the 95,000 acres should at last 
be dry, any Protestant, even though he were a 
foreigner, might buy. Two years later an unfor- 
tunate peace compelled the return of the Dutch 
prisoners ; but the work was done, and the Earl of 
Bedford returned thanks in his cathedral. 

Restored to the leisure which is necessary for 
political action, the Russells actively intrigued for 
the return of the Stuarts, and pointed out (when 
Charles II was well upon his throne) how neces- 
sary it was for the Fens that their old, if irregular, 
privileges should be confirmed. It was argued 
for the Crown that 10,000 acres of land had been 
quietly absorbed by the Family while there was no 
king in England : but there happened in this case, 
what happened in every other since the upper 
class, the natural leaders of the people, had curbed 
the tyranny of the King — Charles capitulated. 
Then followed (of course) popular rising ; it was 
quelled. Before their long struggle for freedom 
against the Stuart dynasty was ended, the peasants 
had been taught their place, Vermuyden was out 
of the way, the ditches were all dug, the land 
acquired. 

All the world knows the great part played by 
the House in the emancipation of England from 
the yoke of James II. The martyrdom of Lord 
William may have cast upon the Family a passing 



A FAMILY OF THE FENS 81 

cloud ; but whatever compensation the perishable 
things of this world can afford, they received and 
accepted. In 1694, having assisted at the destruc- 
tion of yet another form of government, the Earl 
of Bedford was made Duke, and on 7 September, 
1700, his great work now entirely accomplished, 
he departed this life peacefully in his eighty-seventh 
year. It was once more in their cathedral that the 
funeral sermon was preached by a Dr. Freeman, 
chaplain to no less than the King himself. I have 
read the sermon in its entirety. It closes with the 
fine phrase that William the fifth Earl and the 
first Duke of Bedford had sought throughout the 
whole of a laborious and patriotic life a crown not 
corruptible but incorruptible. 

It was precisely a century since the Family had 
set out in its quest for that hundred square miles 
of land. Through four reigns, a bloody civil war, 
three revolutions and innumerable treasons, it had 
maintained its purpose, and at last it reached its 
goal. 

" Tantce molts erat Romanam condere gentem,^* 



G 



THE ELECTION 

THE Other day as I was going out upon my 
travels, I came upon a plain so broad that it 
greatly wearied me. This plain was grown in 
parts with barley, but as it stood high in foreign 
mountains and was arid very little was grown. 
Small runnels, long run dry under the heat, made 
the place look like a desert — almost like Africa ; 
nor was there anything to relieve my gaze except 
a huddle of small grey houses far away ; but when 
I reached them I found, to my inexpressible joy, 
a railway running by and a station to receive me. 

For those who complain of railways talk folly, 
and prove themselves either rich or, more probably, 
the hangers-on of the rich. A railway is an excel- 
lent thing ; it takes one quickly through the world 
for next to nothing, and if in many countries the 
people it takes are brutes, and disfigure all they 
visit, that is not the fault of the railway, but of the 
Government and religion of these people, which, 
between them, have ruined the citizens of the State. 

So was it not in this place of which I speak, for 
all the people were industrious, wealthy, kind, 
amenable and free. 

82 



THE ELECTION 83 

I took a ticket for the only town on the railway 
list whose history I knew, and then in a third-class 
carriage made entirely of wood I settled down to a 
conversation with my kind ; for though these 
people were not of my blood — indeed, I am certain 
that for some hundreds of years not a drop of their 
blood has mingled with my own — yet we under- 
stood each other by a common tongue called 
Lingua Franca, of which I have spoken in another 
place and am a past master. 

As all the people round began their talk of 
cattle, land, and weather, two men next me, or 
rather the one next me and the other opposite me, 
began to talk of the election which had been held 
in that delightful plain : by which, as I learnt, a 
dealer in herds had been defeated by a somewhat 
usurious and perhaps insignificant attorney. In 
this election more than half the voters — that is, a 
good third of the families in the plain— had gone 
up to the little huts of wood and had made a 
mark upon a bit of paper, some on one part, some 
on the other. About a sixth of the families had 
desired the dealer in herds to make their laws, 
and about a sixth the attorney. Of the rest some 
could not, some would not, go and make the little 
mark of which I speak. Many more could by 
law make it, and would have made it, if they had 
thought it useful to any possible purpose under 
the sun. One-sixth, I say, had made their mark 



84 HILLS AND THE SEA 

for the aged and money-lending attorney, and 
one-sixth for the venerable but avaricious dealer 
in herds, and since the first sixth was imperceptibly 
larger than the second it was the lawyer, not the 
merchant, who stood to make the laws for the 
people. But not only to make laws : he was also 
in some mystic way the Persona and Representa- 
tive of all the plain. The long sun-lit fields ; the 
infinite past — Carolingian, enormous ; the delicate 
fronds of young trees ; the distant sight of the 
mountains, which is the note of all that land ; the 
invasions it had suffered, the conquests it might 
yet achieve ; its soul and its material self, were all 
summed up in the solicitor, not in the farmer, and 
he was to vote on peace or war, on wine or water, 
on God or no God in the schools. For the people 
of the plain were self-governing ; they had no lords. 

Of my two companions, the one had voted for 
the cow-buyer, but the other for the scribbler upon 
parchment, and they discussed their action without 
heat, gently and with many reasons. 

The one said: **It cannot be doubted that the 
solidarity of society demands that the homogeneity 
of economic interests should be recognized by the 
magistrate." The other said : ** The first need is 
rather that the historic continuity of society should 
be affirmed by the momentary depositaries of the 
executive." 

For these two men were of some education, and 



THE ELECTION 85 

saw things from a higher standpoint than the 
peasants around us, who continued to discourse, 
now angrily, now merrily, but always loudly and 
rapidly, upon the insignificant matter of their lives: 
that is, strong, red, bubbling wine, healthy and 
well-fed beef, rich land and housing, the marriage 
of daughters, and the putting forward of sons. 

Then one of the two, who had long guessed by 
my dress and face from what country I came, said 
to me : ** And you, how is it in your country ? " I 
told him we met from time to time, upon occasions 
not less often than seven years apart, and did just 
as they had done. That one-sixth of us voted one 
way and one-sixth the other ; the first, let us say 
for a money-lender, and the second for a man 
remarkable for motor-cars or famous for the wealth 
of his mother ; and whichever sixth was imper- 
ceptibly larger than the other, that sixth carried its 
man, and he stood for the flats of the Wash or for 
the clear hills of Cumberland, or for Devon, which 
is all one great and lonely hill. 

**This man," said I, **in some very mystic way 
is Ourselves — he is our past and our great national 
memory. By his vote he decides what shall be 
done ; but he is controlled." 

** By what is he controlled ? " said my companions 
eagerly. Evidently they had a sneaking love of 
seeing representatives controlled. 

<< By a committee of the rich," said I promptly. 



86 HILLS AND THE SEA 

At this they shrugged their shoulders and said : 
** It is a bad system !" 

** And by what are yours ? '' said I. 

At this the gravest and oldest of them, looking 
as it were far away with his eyes, answered : ** By 
the name of our country and a wholesome terror of 
the people." 

** Your system," said I, shrugging my shoulders 
in turn, but a little awkwardly, **is different from 
ours." 

After this, we were silent all three. We remem- 
bered, all three of us, the times when no such things 
were done in Europe, and yet men hung well 
together, and a nation was vaguer and yet more 
instinctive and ready. We remembered also — for 
it was in our common faith — the gross, permanent, 
and irremediable imperfection of human affairs. 
There arose perhaps in their minds a sight of the 
man they had sent to be the spirit and spokesman, 
or rather the very self, of that golden plateau 
which the train was crawling through, and certainly 
in my mind there rose the picture of a man — small, 
false, and vile — who was, by some fiction, the voice 
of a certain valley in my own land. 

Then I said to them as I left the train at the 
town I spoke of: *^Days, knights I" — for so one 
addresses strangers in that country. And they 
answered: **Your grace, we commend you to 
God." 



ARLES 

THE use and the pleasure of travel are closely 
mingled, because the use of it is fulfil- 
ment, and in fulfilling oneself a great pleasure is 
enjoyed. Every man bears within him not only 
his own direct experience, but all the past of his 
blood : the things his own race has done are part 
of himself, and in him also is what his race will 
do when he is dead. This is why men will always 
read records^ and why, even when letters are at 
their lowest, records still remain. Thus, if a diary 
be known to be true, then it seems vivid and 
becomes famous where if it were fiction no one 
would find any merit in it. History, therefore, 
once a man has begun to know it, becomes a 
necessary food for the mind, without which it 
cannot sustain its new dimension. It is an aggre- 
gate of universal experience, nor, other things 
being equal, is any man's judgment so thin and 
weak as the judgment of a man who knows 
nothing of the past. But history, if it is to be 
kept just and true and not to become a set of airy 
scenes, fantastically coloured by our later time, 
must be continually corrected and moderated by 
the seeing and handling of things. ,^ 

87 



88 HILLS AND THE SEA 

If the West of Europe be one place and one 
people separate from all the rest of the world, 
then that unity is of the last importance to us ; 
and that it is so, the wider our learning the more 
certain we are. All our religion and custom and 
mode of thought are European. A European 
State is only a State because it is a State of 
Europe ; and the demarcations between the ever- 
shifting States of Europe are only dotted lines, 
but between the Christian and the non-Christian 
the boundary is hard and full. 

Now, a man who recognizes this truth will ask, 
** Where could I find a model of the past of that 
Europe? In what place could I find the best 
single collection of all the forms which European 
energy has created, and of all the outward sym- 
bols in which its soul has been made manifest? 
To such a man the answer should be given, **You 
will find these things better in the town of Aries 
than in any other place." A man asking such 
a question would mean to travel. He ought to 
travel to Aries » 

Long before men could write, this hill (which 
was the first dry land at the head of the Rhone 
delta, beyond the early mud-flats which the river 
was pushing out into the sea) was inhabited by 
our ancestors. Their barbaric huts were grouped 
round the shelving shore ; their axes and their 
spindles remain. 



ARLES 89 

When thousands of years later the Greeks 
pushed northward from Massilia, Aries was the 
first great corner in their road, and the first halting- 
place after the useless deserts that separated their 
port from the highway of the Rhone valley. 

At the close of Antiquity Rome came to Aries 
in the beginning of her expansion, and the strong 
memories of Rome which Aries still holds are 
famous. Every traveller has heard of the vast 
unbroken amphitheatre and the ruined temple in 
a market square that is still called the Forum ; they 
are famous — but when you see them it seems to 
you that they should be more famous still. They 
have something about them so familiar and yet so 
unexpected that the centuries in which they were 
built come actively before you. 

The city of Aries is small and packed. A man 
may spend an hour in it instead of a day or a 
year, but in that hour he can receive full communion 
with antiquity. For as you walk along the tor- 
tuous lane between high houses, passing on either 
hand as you go the ornaments of every age, you 
turn some dirty little corner or other and come 
suddenly upon the titanic arches of Rome. There 
are the huge stones which appal you with the 
Roman weight and perpetuate in their arrange- 
ment an order that has modelled the world. They 
lie exact and mighty ; they are unmoved, clamped 



90 HILLS AND THE SEA 

with metal, a little worn, enduring. They are 
none the less a domestic and native part of the 
living town in which they stand. You pass from 
the garden of a house that was built in your 
grandfather's time, and you see familiarly before 
you in the street a pedestal and a column. They 
are two thousand years old. You read a placard 
idly upon the wall; the placard interests you; it 
deals with the politics of the place or with the 
army, but the wall might be meaningless. You 
look more closely, and you see that that wall was 
raised in a fashion that has been forgotten since 
the Antonines, and these realities still press upon 
you, revealed and lost again with every few steps 
you walk within the limited circuit of the town. 

Rome slowly fell asleep. The sculpture lost 
its power; something barbaric returned. You 
may see that decline in capitals and masks still 
embedded in buildings of the fifth century. The 
sleep grew deeper. There came five hundred 
years of which so little is left in Europe that Paris 
has but one doubtful tower and London nothing. 
Aries still preserves its relics. When Charlemagne 
was dead and Christendom almost extinguished 
the barbarian and the Saracen alternately built, and 
broke against, a keep that still stands and that is 
still so strong that one might still defend it. It is 
unlit. It is a dungeon ; a ponderous menace above 
the main street of the city, blind and enormous. 
It is the very time it comes from. 



ARLES 91 

When all that fear and anarchy of the mind had 
passed, and when it was discovered that the West 
still lived, a dawn broke. The medieval civiliza- 
tion began to sprout vigorously through the 
eleventh and twelfth centuries, as an old tree 
sprouts before March is out. The memorials of 
that transition are common enough. We have 
them here in England in great quantity; we call 
them the ** Norman" architecture. A peculiarly 
vivid relic of that spring-time remains at Aries. 
It is the door of what was then the cathedral— the 
door of St. Trophimus. It perpetuates the be- 
ginning of the civilization of the Middle Ages. 
And of that civilization an accident which has all 
the force of a particular design has preserved here, 
attached to this same church, another complete 
type. The cloisters of this same Church of St. 
Trophimus are not only the Middle Ages caught 
and made eternal, they are also a progression of that 
great experiment from its youth to its sharp close. 

You come into these cloisters from a little side 
street and a neglected yard, which give you no 
hint of what you are going to see. You find your- 
self cut off at once and put separately by. Silence 
inhabits the place ; you see nothing but the sky 
beyond the border of the low roofs. One old man 
there, who cannot read or write and is all but 
blind, will talk to you of the Rhone. Then as you go 
round the arches, '* withershins" against the sun 



92 HILLS AND THE SEA 

(in which way lucky progression has always been 
made in sacred places), there pass you one after 
the other the epochs of the Middle Ages. For 
each group of arches comes later than the last in 
the order of its sculpture, and the sculptors during 
those 300 years went withershins as should you. 

You have first the solemn purpose of the early 
work. This takes on neatness of detail, then 
fineness ; a great maturity dignifies all the northern 
side. Upon the western you already see that 
spell beneath which the Middle Ages died. The 
mystery of the fifteenth century ; none of its 
wickedness but all its final vitality, is there. You 
see in fifty details the last attempt of our race to 
grasp and permanently to retain the beautiful. 

When the circuit is completed the series ends 
abruptly — as the medieval story itself ended. 

There is no way of writing or of telling history 
which could be so true as these visions are. Aries, 
at a corner of the great main road of the Empire, 
never so strong as to destroy nor so insignificant 
as to cease from building, catching the earliest 
Roman march into the north, the Christian 
advance, the full experience of the invasions ; 
retaining in a vague legend the memory of 
St. Paul ; drawing in, after the long trouble, the 
new life that followed the Crusades, can show 
such visions better, I think, than Rome herself 
can show them. 



THE GRIFFIN 

A SPECIALIST told me once in Ealing that no 
inn could compare with the Griffin, a Fenland 
inn. ** It is painted green," he said, "and stands 
in the town of March. If you would enjoy the 
Griffin, you must ask your way to that town, and 
as you go ask also for the Griffin, for many who 
may not have heard of March will certainly have 
heard of the Griffin." 

So I set out at once for the Fens and came at 
the very beginning of them to a great ditch, 
which barred all further progress. I wandered 
up and down the banks for an hour thinking of 
the inn, when I met a man who was sadder and 
more silent even than the vast level and lonely 
land in which he lived. I asked him how I should 
cross the great dyke. He shook his head, and said 
he did not know. I asked him if he had heard of 
the Griffin, but he said no. I broke away from 
him and went for miles along the bank eastward, 
seeing the rare trees of the marshes dwindling in 
the distance, and up against the horizon a distant 
spire, which I thought might be the Spire of 

93 



94 HILLS AND THE SEA 

March. For March and the Griffin were not twenty 
miles away. And still the great ditch stood between 
me and my pilgrimage. 

• ••••• 

These dykes of the Fens are accursed things : 
they are the separation of friends and lovers. 
Here is a man whose crony would come and sit by 
his fireside at evening and drink with him, a 
custom perhaps of twenty years' standing, when 
there comes another man from another part armed 
with public power, and digs between them a trench 
too wide to leap and too soft to ford. The Fens 
are full of such tragedies. 

One may march up and down the banks all day 
without finding a boat, and as for bridges there 
are none, except, indeed, the bridges which the 
railway makes ; for the railways have grown to be 
as powerful as the landlords or the brewers, and 
can go across this country where they choose. 
And here the Fens are typical, for it may be said 
that these three monopolies — the landlords, the 
railways, and the brewers — govern England. 

But at last, at a place called Oxlode, I found 
a boat, and the news that just beyond lay another 
dyke. I asked where that could be crossed, but 
the ferryman of Oxlode did not know. He pointed 
two houses out, however, standing close together 
out of the plain, and said that they were called 



THE GRIFFIN 95 

*'Purles' Bridge/' and that I would do well to try 
there. But when I reached them I found that the 
water was between me and them and, what is 
more, that there was no bridge there and never 
had been one since the beginning of time. Of these 
jests the Fens are full. 

In half an hour a man came out of one of the 
houses and ferried me across in silence. I asked 
him also if he had heard of the Griffin. He 
laughed and shook his head as the first one had 
done, but he showed me a little way off the village 
of Monea, saying that the people of that place 
knew every house for a day's walk around. So 
I trudged to Monea, which is a village on one 
of the old dry islands of the marsh ; but no one ajt 
Monea knew. There was, none the less, one old 
man who told me he had heard the name, and his 
advice to me was to go to the cross roads and past 
them towards March, and then to ask again. So 
I went outwards to the cross roads, and from the 
cross roads outward again it seemed without end, a 
similar land repeating itself for ever. There was 
the same silence, the same completely even soil, 
the same deep little trenches, the same rare distant 
and regular rows of trees. 

• ••••• 

Since it was useless to continue thus for you — 
one yard was as good as twenty miles — and since 
you could know nothing more of these silences, 



96 HILLS AND THE SEA 

even if I were to give you every inch of the road, 
I will pass at once to the moment in which I saw 
a baker's cart catching me up at great speed. The 
man inside had an expression of irritable poverty. 
I did not promise him money, but gave it him. 
Then he took me aboard and rattled on, with me 
by his side. 

I had by this time a suspicion that the Griffin 
was a claustral thing and a mystery not to be 
blurted out. I knew that all the secrets of 
Hermes may be reached by careful and long-drawn 
words, and that the simplest of things will not be 
told one if one asks too precipitately ; so I began to 
lay siege to his mind by the method of dialogue. 
The words were these : — 

Myself: This land wanted draining, didn't it? 

The Other Man : Ah ! 

Myself : It seems to be pretty well drained 
now. 

The Other Man : Ugh I 

Myself : I mean it seems dry enough. 

The Other Man : It was drownded only last 
winter. 

Myself : It looks to be good land. 

The Other Man : It's lousy land ; it's worth 
nowt. 

Myself : Still, there are dark bits — black, you 
may say — and thereabouts it will be good. 

The Other Man : That's where you're wrong ; 



THE GRIFFIN 97 

the lighter it is the better it is ... ah ! that's 
where many of 'em go wrong. {Short silence,) 
Myself {cheerfully) : A sort of loam ? 
The Other Man {Calmnistically)\ Ugh !— sand ! 
. . . {shaking his head). It blaws away with a 
blast of wind. {A longer silence,) 

Myself {as though full of interest) : Then you 
set your drills to sow deep about here ? 

The Other Man {with a gesture of fatigue) : 
Shoal. {Here he sighed deeply,) 

After this we ceased to speak to each other for 
several miles. Then : 

Myself : Who owns the land about here ? 
The Other Man : Some owns parts and some 
others. 

Myself {angrily pointing to an enormous field 
with a little new house in the middle) : Who owns 
that? 

The Other Man {startled by my tone) : A 
Frenchman. He grows onions. 

Now if you know little of England and of the 
temper of the English (I mean of -999 of the English 
people and not of the '001 with which you asso- 
ciate), if, I say, you know little or nothing of your 
fellow-countrymen, you may imagine that all this 
conversation was wasted. ** It was not to the 
point," you say. **You got no nearer the Griffin." 
You are wrong. Such conversation is like the 
kneading of dough or the mixing of mortar ; it 

H 



98 HILLS AND THE SEA 

mollifies and makes ready ; it is three-quarters 
of the work ; for if you will let your fellow-citizen 
curse you and grunt at you, and if you will but 
talk to him on matters which he knows far better 
than you, then you have him ready at the end. 

So had I this man, for I asked him point-blank 
at the end of all this : *^ W/iai^ about the Griffin?^^ 
He looked at me for a moment almost with intelli- 
gence, and told me that he would hand me over in 
the next village to a man who was going through 
March. So he did, and the horse of this second 
man was even faster than that of the baker. The 
horses of the Fens are like no horses in the world 
for speed. 

This horse was twenty-three years old, yet it 
went as fast as though all that tomfoolery men 
talk about progress were true, and as though 
things got better by the process of time. It went 
so fast that one might imagine it at forty-six 
winning many races, and at eighty standing be- 
yond all comparison or competition ; and because 
it went so fast I went hammering right through 
the town of March before I had time to learn its 
name or to know whither I was driving ; it whirled 
me past the houses and out into the country 
beyond : only when I had pulled up two miles 
beyond did I know what I had done and did I 
realize that I had missed for ever one of those 



THE GRIFFIN 99 

pleasures which, fleeting as they are, are all that is 
to be discovered in human life. It went so fast, 
that before I knew what had happened the Griffin 

had flashed by me and was gone. 

• • • • • • 

Yet I will affirm with the tongue of faith that 

it is the noblest house of call in the Fens. 

• • • . • . 

It is better to believe than to handle or to see. 
I will affirm with the tongue of faith that the 
Griffin is, as it were, the captain and chief of these 
plains, and has just managed to touch perfection 
in all the qualities that an inn should achieve. I 
am speaking not of what I know by the doubtful 
light of physical experience, but of what I have 
seen with the inward eye and felt by something 
that transcends gross taste and touch. 

Low rooms of my repose ! Beams of comfort 
and great age ; drowsy and inhabiting fires ; 
ingle-nooks made for companionship. Yqu also, 
beer much better, much more soft, than the beer of 
lesser towns ; beans, bacon, and chicken cooked to 
the very limit of excellence ; port drawn from 
barrels which the simple Portuguese had sent to 
Lynn over the cloud-shadowed sea, and honour- 
able Lynn without admixture had sent upon a cart 
to you, port undefiled, port homogeneous, entirely 
made of wine : you also beds ! Wooden beds 
with curtains around them, feathers for sleeping 

LOFC 



100 HILLS AND THE SEA 

on, and every decent thing which the accursed 

would attempt to destroy ; candles (I trust) — and 

trust is more perfect than proof — bread made (if it 

be possible) out of English wheat ; milk drawn 

most certainly from English cows, and butter 

worthy of the pastures of England all around. 

Oh, glory of the Fens, Griffin, it shall not be said 

that I have not enjoyed you ! 

• ••••• 

There is a modern habit, I know, of gloom, and 
men without faith upon every side recount the 
things that they have not enjoyed. For my part 
I will yield to no such habit. I will consider that 
I have more perfectly tasted in the mind that 
which may have been denied to my mere body, 
and I will produce for myself and others a greater 
pleasure than any pleasure of the sense. I will do 
what the poets and the prophets have always done, 
and satisfy myself with vision, and (who knows ?) 
perhaps by this the Griffin of the Idea has been 
made a better thing (if that were possible !) than 
the Griffin as it is — as it materially stands in this 
evil and uncertain world. 

So let the old horse go by and snatch me from 
this chance of joy : he has not taken everything 
in his flight, and there remains something in spite 
of time, which eats us all up. 

And yet , . . what is that in me which makes 
me regret the Griffin, the real Griffin at which 



THE GRIFFIN 101 

they would not let me stay ? The Griffin painted 
green : the real rooms, the real fire . . . the 
material beer? Alas for mortality! Something 
in me still clings to affections temporal and mun- 
dane. England, my desire, what have you not 
refused me ! 



THE FIRST DAY'S MARCH 

I VERY well remember the spring ' breaking 
ten years ago in Lorraine. I remember it 
better far than I shall ever remember another 
spring, because one of those petty summits of 
emotion that seem in boyhood like the peaks of 
the world was before me. We were going off to 
camp. 

Since every man that fires guns or drives them 
in France — that is, some hundred thousand and 
more at any one time, and taking in reserves, half a 
million — must go to camp in his time, and that 
more than once, it seems monstrous that a boy 
should make so much of it ; but then to a boy 
six months is a little lifetime, and for six months 
I had passed through that great annealing fire of 
drill which stamps and moulds the French people 
to-day, putting too much knowledge and bitter- 
ness into their eyes, but a great determination 
into their gestures and a trained tenacity into the 
methods of their thought. 

To me also this fire seemed fiercer and more 
transforming because, until the day when they 

102 



THE FIRST DAY'S MARCH 103 

had marched me up to barracks in the dark and 
the rain with the batch of recruits, I had known 
nothing but the easy illusions and the comfort of 
an English village, and had had but journeys or 
short visits to teach me that enduring mystery of 
Europe, the French temper : whose aims and reti- 
cence, whose hidden enthusiasms, great range of 
effort, divisions, defeats, and resurrections must 
now remain the principal problem before my mind ; 
for the few who had seen this sight know that 
the French mind is the pivot on which Europe 
turns. 

I had come into the regiment faulty in my 
grammar and doubtful in accent, ignorant especi- 
ally of those things which in every civilization 
are taken for granted but never explained in full ; 
I was ignorant, therefore, of the key which alone 
can open that civilization to a stranger. Things 
irksome or a heavy burden to the young men of 
my age, born and brought up in the French air, 
were to me, brought up with Englishmen an 
Englishman, odious and bewildering. Orders 
that I but half comprehended ; simple phrases that 
seemed charged with menace ; boasting (a habit 
of which I knew little), coupled with a fierce and, 
as it were, expected courage that seemed ill-suited 
to boasting— and certainly unknown outside this 
army ; enormous powers of endurance in men 
whose stature my English training had taught me 



104 HILLS AND THE SEA 

to despise ; a habit of fighting with the fists, 
coupled with a curious contempt for the accident 
of individual superiority — all these things amazed 
me and put me into a topsy-turvy world where 
I was weeks in finding my feet. 

But strangest of all, and (as I now especially 
believe) most pregnant with meaning for the 
future, was to find the inherited experience in me 
of so much teaching and careful habit — instinct of 
command, if you will — all that goes to make what 
we call in Western Europe a *^ gentleman," put at 
the orders and the occasional insult of a hierarchy 
of office, many of whose functionaries were peasants 
and artisans. Stripes on the arm, symbols, sud- 
denly became of overwhelming value ; what I had 
been made with so much care in an English public 
school was here thought nothing but a hindrance 
and an absurdity. This had seemed to me first a 
miracle, then a grievous injustice, then most un- 
practical, and at last, like one that sees the answer 
to a riddle, I saw (when I had long lost my man- 
ners and ceased to care for refinements) that the 
French were attempting, a generation before any 
others in the world, to establish an army that 
should be a mere army, and in which a living 
man counted only as one numbered man. 

Whether that experiment will hold or not I can- 
not tell ; it shocks the refinement of the whole 
West of Europe ; it seems monstrous to the aristo- 



THE FIRST DAY'S MARCH 105 

cratic organization of Germany ; it jars in France 
also with the traditions of that decent elder class 
of whom so many still remain to guide the Re- 
public, and in whose social philosophy the segre- 
gation of a * directing class" has been hitherto a 
dogma. But soon I cared little whether that ex- 
periment was to succeed or no in its final effort, or 
whether the French were to perfect a democracy 
where wealth has one vast experience of its own 
artificiality, or to fail. The intellectual interest of 
such an experiment, when once I seized it, drove 
out every other feeling. 

I became like a man who has thoroughly 
awaked from a long sleep and finds that in sleep 
he has been taken overseas. I merged into the 
great system whose wheels and grindings had at 
first astonished or disgusted me, and I found that 
they had made of me what they meant to make. I 
cared more for guns than for books ; I now obeyed 
by instinct not men, but symbols of authority. 
No comfortable fallacy remained ; it no longer 
seemed strange that my captain was a man pro- 
moted from the ranks ; that one of my lieutenants 
was an Alsatian charity boy and the other a rich 
fellow mixed up with sugar-broking ; that the 
sergeant of my piece should be a poor young 
noble, the wheeler of No. 5 a wealthy and very 
vulgar chemist's son, the man in the next bed (my 
** ancient," as they say in that service) a cook of 



106 HILLS AND THE SEA 

some skill, and my bombardier a mild young 
farmer. I thought only in terms of the artillery : 
I could judge men for their aptitude alone, and in 
me, I suppose, were accomplished many things — 
one of Danton's dreams, one of St. Just's prophe- 
cies, the fulfilment also of what a hundred brains 
had silently determined twenty years before when 
the staff gave up their swords outside Metz ; the 
army and the kind of army of which Chanzy had 
said in the first breath of the armistice, ** A man 
who forgets it should be hanged, but a man who 
speaks of it before its time should be shot with the 
honours of his rank." 

All this had happened to me in especial in that 
melting-pot up in the eastern hills, and to thirty 
thousand others that year in their separate cru- 
cibles. 

In the process things had passed which would 
seem to you incredible if I wrote them all down. 
I cared little in what vessel I ate, or whether I had 
to tear meat with my fingers. I could march in 
reserve more than twenty miles a day for day 
upon day. I knew all about my horses ; I could 
sweep, wash, make a bed, clean kit, cook a little, 
tidy a stable, turn to entrenching for emplace- 
ment, take a place at lifting a gun or changing a 
wheel. I took change with a gunner, and could 
point well. And all this was not learnt save under 
a grinding pressure of authority and harshness, 



THE FIRST DAY'S MARCH 107 

without which in one's whole life I suppose one 
would never properly have learnt a half of these 
things — at least, not to do them so readily, or in 
such unison, or on so definite a plan. But (what 
will seem astonishing to our critics and verbalists) 
with all this there increased the power, or perhaps 
it was but the desire, to express the greatest 
thoughts — newer and keener things. I began to 
understand De Vigny when he wrote, ** If a man 
despairs of becoming a poet, let him carry his pack 
and march in the ranks." 

Thus the great hills that border the Moselle, the 
distant frontier, the vast plain which is (they say) 
to be a battlefield, and which lay five hundred feet 
sheer below me; the far guns when they were 
practising at Metz, the awful strength of columns 
on the march moved me. The sky also grew more 
wonderful, and I noticed living things. The Middle 
Ages, of which till then I had had but troubling 
visions, rose up and took flesh in the old town, on 
the rare winter evenings when I had purchased the 
leisure to leave quarters by some excessive toil. A 
man could feel France going by. 

It was at the end of these six months, when 
there was no more darkness at roll-call, and when 
the bitter cold (that had frozen us all winter) was half 
forgotten, that the spring brought me this excellent 
news, earlier than I had dared to expect it—the 
news that sounds to a recruit half as good as active 



108 HILLS AND THE SEA 

service. We were going to march and go off right 
away westward over half a dozen horizons, till we 
could see the real thing at Chalons, and with this 
news the world seemed recreated. 

Seven times that winter we had been mobilized ; 
four times in the dead of the night, once at mid- 
day, once at evening, and once at dawn. Seven 
times we had started down the wide Metz road, 
hoping in some vague way that they would do 
something with us and give us at least some 
manoeuvres, and seven times we had marched back 
to barracks to undo all that serious packing and to 
return to routine. 

Once, for a week in February, the French and 
German Governments, or, more probably, two 
minor permanent officials, took it into their silly 
heads that there was some danger of war. We 
packed our campaign saddles every night and put 
them on the pegs behind the stalls ; we had the 
emergency rations served out, and for two days in 
the middle of that time we had slept ready. But 
nothing came of it. Now at least we were off to 
play a little at the game whose theory we had 
learnt so wearily. 

And the way I first knew it would easily fill a 
book if it were told as it should be, with every 
detail and its meaning unrolled and with every joy 
described: as it is, I must put it in ten lines. 
Garnon (a sergeant), three others, and I were sent 



THE FIRST DAY'S MARCH 109 

out (one patrol out of fifty) to go round and see 
the reserve horses on the farms. That was delight 
enough, to have a vigorous windy morning with 
the clouds large and white and in a clear sky, and 
to mix with the first grain of the year, *^out of the 
loose-box." 

We took the round they gave us along the base 
of the high hills, we got our papers signed at the 
different stables, we noted the hoofs of the horses 
and their numbers; a good woman at a large farm 
gave us food of eggs and onions, and at noon we 
turned to get back to quarters for the grooming. 
Everything then was very well — to have ridden 
out alone without the second horse and with no 
horrible great pole to crush one's leg, and be 
free — though we missed it— of the clank of the 
guns. We felt like gentlemen at ease, and were 
speaking grandly to each other, when I heard 
Garnon say to the senior of us a word that made 
things seem better still, for he pointed out to a 
long blue line beyond Domremyand overhanging 
the house of Joan of Arc, saying that the town lay 
there. "What town?" said I to my Ancient ; and 
my Ancient, instead of answering simply, took five 
minutes to explain to me how a recruit could 
not know that the round of the reserve horses 
came next before camp, and that this town away 
on the western ridge was the first halting-place 
upon the road. Then my mind filled with distances, 



110 HILLS AND THE SEA 

and I was overjoyed, saving for this one thing, 
that I had but two francs and a few coppers left, 
and that I was not in reach of more. 

When we had ridden in, saluted and reported 
at the guard, we saw the guns drawn up in line at 
the end of the yard, and we went into grooming 
and ate and slept, hardly waiting for the morning 
and the long regimental call before the reveille; 
the notes that always mean the high road for an 
army, and that are as old as Fontenoy. 



That next morning they woke us all before 
dawn — long before dawn. The sky was still keen, 
and there was not even a promise of morning in 
the air, nor the least faintness in the eastern stars. 
They twinkled right on the edges of the world 
over the far woods of Lorraine, beyond the hollow 
wherein lay the town ; it was even cold like winter 
as we harnessed ; and I remember the night air 
catching me in the face as I staggered from the 
harness-room, with my campaign saddle and the 
traces and the girths and the saddle cloth, and 
all the great weight that I had to put upon my 
horses. 

We stood in the long stables all together, very 
hurriedly saddling and bridling and knotting up 
the traces behind. A few lanterns gave us an im- 
perfect light. We hurried because it was a pride 



THE FIRST DAY'S MARCH 111 

to be the first battery, and in the French service, 
rightly or wrongly, everything in the artillery is 
made for speed, and to speed everything is sacri- 
ficed. So we made ready in the stable and brought 
our horses out in order before the guns in the open 
square of quarters. The high plateau on which 
the barracks stood was touched with a last late 
frost, and the horses coming out of the warm 
stables bore the change ill, lifting their heads and 
stamping. A man could not leave the leaders for 
a moment, and, while the chains were hooked on, 
even my middle horses were restive and had to be 
held. My hands stiffened at the reins, and I tried 
to soothe both my beasts, as the lantern went 
up and down wherever the work was being done. 
They quieted when the light was taken round 
behind by the tumbrils, where two men were 
tying on the great sack of oats exactly as though 
we were going on campaign. 

These two horses of mine were called Facte and 
Basilique. Basilique was saddled : a slow beast, 
full of strength and sympathy, but stupid and 
given to sudden fears. Facte was the led horse, 
and had never heard guns. It was prophesied 
that when first I should have to hold him in camp 
when we were practising he would break every- 
thing near him, and either kill me or get me cells. 
But I did not believe these prophecies, having 
found my Ancient and all third-year men too 



112 HILLS AND THE SEA 

often to be liars, fond of frightening the younger 
recruits. Meanwhile Facte stood in the sharp 
night, impatient, and shook his harness. Every- 
thing had been quickly ordered. 

We filed out of quarters, passed the lamp of the 
guard, and saw huddled there the dozen or so that 
were left behind while we were off to better things. 
Then a drawn-out cry at the head of the column 
was caught up all along its length, and we trotted ; 
the metal of shoes and wheel-rims rang upon the 
road, and I felt as a man feels on a ship when it 
leaves harbour for great discoveries. 

We had climbed the steep bank above St. 
Martin, and were on the highest ridge of land 
dominating the plain, when the sky first felt the 
approach of the sun. Our backs were to the east, 
but the horizon before us caught a reflection of the 
dawn ; the woods lost their mystery, and one 
found oneself marching in a partly cultivated open 
space with a forest all around. The road ran 
straight for miles like an arrow, and stretched 
swarmingly along it was the interminable line of 
guns. But with the full daylight, and after the 
sun had risen in a mist, they deployed us out of 
column into a wide front on a great heath in the 
forest, and we halted. There we brewed coffee, 
not by batteries, but gun by gun. 

Warmed by this little meal, mere coffee without 
sugar or milk, but with a hunk left over from yes- 



THE FIRST DAY'S MARCH 113 

terday's bread and drawn stale from one's haver- 
sack (the armies of the Republic and of Napoleon 
often fought all day upon such sustenance, and 
even now, as you will see, the French do not 
really eat till a march is over — and this may be a 
great advantage in warfare) — warmed, I say, by 
this little meal, and very much refreshed by the 
sun and the increasing merriment of morning, we 
heard first the trumpet-call and then the shouted 
order to mount. 

We did not form one column again. We went 
off at intervals by batteries ; and the reason of this 
was soon clear, for on getting to a place where 
four roads met, some took one and some took 
another, the object being to split up the unwieldy 
train of thirty-six guns, with all their waggons 
and forges, into a number of smaller groups, 
marching by ways more or less parallel towards 
the same goal ; and my battery was left separate, 
and went at last along a lane that ran through 
pasture land in a valley. 

The villages were already awake, and the mist 
was all but lifted from the meadows when we 
heard men singing in chorus in front of us some 
way off. These were the gunners that had left 
long before us and had gone on forward afoot. 
For in the French artillery it is a maxim (for all I 
know, common to all others— if other artilleries 
are wise) that you should weight your limber (and 
I 



114 HILLS AND THE SEA 

therefore your horses) with useful things alone ; 
and as gunners are useful only to fire guns, they 
are not carried, save into action or when some 
great rapidity of movement is desired. I do, in- 
deed, remember one case when it was thought 
necessary to send a group of batteries during the 
manoeuvres right over from the left to the right of 
a very long position which our division was occu- 
pying on the crest of the Argonne. There was 
the greatest need for haste, and we packed the 
gunners on to the limber (there were no seats on 
the gun in the old type — there are now) and gal- 
loped all the way down the road, and put the 
guns in action with the horses still panting and 
exhausted by that extra weight carried at such a 
speed and for such a distance. But on the march, 
I say again, we send the gunners forward, and 
not only the gunners, but, as you shall hear when 
we come to Commercy, a reserve of drivers also. 
We send them forward an hour or two before the 
guns start ; we catch them up with the guns on 
the road ; they file up to let us pass, and com- 
monly salute us by way of formality and cere- 
mony. Then they come into the town of the halt 
an hour or two after we have reached it. 

So here in this silent and delightful valley, 
through which ran a river, which may have been 
the Meuse or may have been a tributary only, we 
caught up our gunners. Their song ceased, they 



THE FIRST DAY'S MARCH 115 

were lined up along the road, and not till we were 
passed were they given a little halt and repose. 
But when we had gone past with a huge clattering 
and dust, the bombardier of my piece, who was 
a very kindly man, a young farmer, and who hap- 
pened to be riding abreast of my horses, pointed 
them out to me behind us at a turning in the road. 
They were taking that five minutes' rest which the 
French have borrowed from the Germans, and 
which comes at the end of every hour on the 
march. They had thrown down their knapsacks 
and were lying flat taking their ease. I could not 
long look backwards, but a very little time after, 
when we had already gained nearly half a mile 
upon them, we again heard the noise of their sing- 
ing, and knew that they had re-shouldered the 
heavy packs. And this pack is the same in every 
unmounted branch of the service, and is the 
heaviest thing, I believe, that has been carried by 
infantry since the Romans. 

It was not yet noon, and extremely hot for the 
time of year and for the coldness of the preceding 
night, when they halted us at a place where the 
road bent round in a curve and went down a little 
hollow. There we dismounted and cleaned things 
up a little before getting into the town, where we 
were to find what the French call an etape; that is, 
the town at which one halts at the end of one's 
march, and the word is also used for the length of 



116 HILLS AND THE SEA 

a march itself. It is not in general orders to clean 
up in this way before coming in, and there were 
some commanders who were never more pleased 
than when they could bring their battery into town 
covered with dust and the horses steaming and the 
men haggard, for this they thought to be evidence 
of a workmanlike spirit. But our colonel had given 
very contrary orders, to the annoyance of our 
captain, a man risen from the ranks who loved the 
guns and hated finery. 

Then we went at a walk, the two trumpets of the 
battery sounding the call which is known among 
French gunners as **the eighty hunters," because 
the words to it are, ^^ quatre-vtngty quatre-vingt^ 
quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt, quatre- 
vingt^ quatre-vingt, chasseurs," which words, by 
their metallic noise and monotony, exactly express 
the long call that announces the approach of guns. 
We went right through the town, the name of 
which is Commercy, and the boys looked at us 
with pride, not knowing how hateful they would 
find the service when once they were in for its 
grind and hopelessness. But then, for that matter, 
I did not know myself with what great pleasure I 
should look back upon it ten years after. More- 
over, nobody knows beforehand whether he will 
like a thing or not ; and there is the end of it. 

We formed a park in the principal place of the 
town ; there were appointed two sentinels to do 



THE FIRST DAY'S MARCH 117 

duty until the arrival of the gunners who should 
relieve them and mount a proper guard, and then 
we were marched off to be shown our various 
quarters. For before a French regiment arrives at 
a town others have ridden forward and have 
marked in chalk upon the doors how many men 
and how many horses are to be quartered here or 
there, and my quarters were in a great barn with a 
very high roof; but my Ancient, upon whom I 
depended for advice, was quartered in a house, and 
I was therefore lonely. 

We groomed our horses, ate our great mid-day 
meal, and were free for a couple of hours to wander 
about the place. It is a garrison, and, at that 
time, it was full of cavalry, with whom we frater- 
nized ; but the experiment was a trifle dangerous, 
for there is always a risk of a quarrel when regi- 
ments meet as there is with two dogs, or two of 
any other kind of lively things. 

Then came the evening, and very early, before 
it was dark, I was asleep in my clothes in some 
straw, very warm ; but I was so lazy that I had 
not even taken off my belt or sword. And that 
was the end of the first day's marching. 



THE SEA-WALL OF THE WASH 

THE town of Wisbeach is very like the town 
of Boston. It stands upon a river which is 
very narrow and which curves, and in which there 
rises and falls a most considerable tide, and which 
is bounded by slimy wooden sides. Here, as at 
Boston, the boats cannot turn round ; if they come 
in frontways they have to go out backwards, like 
Mevagissey bees : an awkward harbour. 

As I sat there in the White Hart, waiting for 
steak and onions, I read in a book descriptive of 
the place that a whale had come to Wisbeach once, 
and I considered that a whale coming up to 
Wisbeach on a tide would certainly stay there ; 
not indeed for the delights of the town (of which 
I say nothing), but because there would be no 
room for it to turn round ; and a whale cannot 
swim backwards. The only fish that can swim 
backwards is an eel. This I have proved by 
observation, and I challenge any fisherman to 
deny it. 

So much for Wisbeach, which stands upon the 
River Nene or Nen, which is the last of the towns 

ii8 



SEA-WALL OF THE WASH 119 

defended by the old sea-wall — which is the third 

of the Fen ports — the other two being Boston and 

Lynn, which is served by two lines of railway and 

which has two stations. 

Very early next morning, and by one of these 

stations, another man and I took train to a bridge 

called Sutton Bridge, where one can cross the 

River Nen, and where (according to the map) one 

can see both the sea-walls, the old and the new. 

It was my plan to walk along the shore of the 

Wash right across the flats to Lynn, and so at last 

perhaps comprehend the nature of this curious 

land. 

. . * . • • 

When I got to Sutton Bridge I discovered it to 
be a monstrous thing of iron standing poised upon 
a huge pivot in mid-stream. It bore the railway 
and the road together. It was that kind of 
triumphant engineering which once you saw only in 
England, but which now you will see all over the 
world. It was designed to swing open on its 
central pivot to let boats go up the River Nen, 
and then to come back exactly to its place with a 
clang ; but when we got to it we found it neither 
one thing nor the other. It was twisted just so 
much that the two parts of the roads (the road on 
the bridge and the road on land) did not join. 

Was a boat about to pass ? No. Why was it 
open thus ? A man was cleaning it. The bridge 



120 HILLS AND THE SEA 

is not as big as the Tower Bridge, but it is very- 
big, and the man was cleaning it with a little rag. 
He was cleaning the under part, the mechanisms 
and contraptions that can only be got at when the 
bridge is thus ajar. He cleaned without haste and 
without exertion, and as I watched him I considered 
the mightiness of the works of Man contrasted with 
His Puny Frame. I also asked him when I should 
pass, but he answered nothing. 

As we thus waited men gathered upon either 
side — men of all characters and kinds, men holding 
bicycles, men in carts, afoot, on horseback, vigorous 
men and feeble, old men, women also and little 
children, and youths witless of life, and innocent 
young girls ; they gathered and increased, they 
became as numerous as leaves, they stretched out 
their hands in a desire for the further shore : but 
the river ran between. 

Then, as being next the gate, I again called 
out: When might we pass? A Fenland man who 
was on duty there doing nothing said, I could 
pass when the bridge was shut again. I said : 
When would that be? He said : Could I not see 
that the man was cleaning the bridge? I said that, 
contrasting the bridge with him and his little rag, 
he might go on from now to the Disestablishment 
of the English Church before he had done ; but as 
for me, I desired to cross, and so did all that 
multitude. 



SEA-WALL OF THE WASH 121 

Without grace they shut the bridge for us, the 
gate opened of itself, and in a great clamorous 
flood, like an army released from a siege, we 
poured over, all of us, rejoicing into Wringland ; 
for so is called this flat, reclaimed land, which 
stands isolated between the Nen and the Ouse. 



Was I not right in saying when I wrote about 
Ely that the corner of a corner of England is 
infinite, and can never be exhausted ? 

Along the cut which takes the Nen out to sea, 
then across some level fields, and jumping a ditch 
or two, one gets to the straight, steep, and high 
dyke which protects the dry land and cuts off the 
plough from the sea marshes. When I had 
climbed it and looked out over endless flats to the 
sails under the brune of the horizon I understood 
the Fens. 

Nowhere that I have been to in the world does 
the land fade into the sea so inconspicuously. 

The coasts of western England are like the death 
of a western man in battle — violent and heroic. 
The land dares all, and plunges into a noisy sea. 
This coast of eastern England is like the death of 
one of these eastern merchants here — lethargic, ill- 
contented, drugged with ease. The dry land slips, 
and wallows into a quiet, very shallow water, con- 



122 HILLS AND THE SEA 

fused with a yellow thickness and brackish with 
the weight of inland water behind. 

I have heard of the great lakes, especially of the 
marshes at the mouth of the Volga, in the Caspian, 
where the two elements are for miles indistinguish- 
able, and where no one can speak of a shore ; but 
here the thing is more marvellous, because it is the 
true sea. You have, I say, the true sea, with 
great tides, and bearing ships, and seaports to 
which the ships can go ; and on the other side you 
have, inhabited, an ancient land. There should 
be a demarcation between them, a tide mark or 
limit. There is nothing. You cannot say where 
one begins and the other ends. One does not un- 
derstand the Fens until one has seen that shore. 

The sand and the mud commingle. The mud 
takes on little tufts of salt grass barely growing 
under the harsh wind. The marsh is cut and 
wasted into little islands covered at every high 
tide, except, perhaps, the extreme of the neaps. 
Down on that level, out from the dyke to the 
uncertain line of the water, you cannot walk a 
hundred yards without having to cross a channel 
more or less deep, a channel which the working of 
the muddy tides has scoured up into the silt and 
ooze of the sodden land. These channels are 
yards deep in slime, and they ramify like the 
twisted shoots of an old vine. Were you to make 
a map of them as they engrave this desolate waste 



SEA-WALL OF THE WASH 123 

it would look like the fine tortuous cracks that 
show upon antique enamel, or the wandering of 
threads blown at random on a woman's work- 
table by the wind. 

There are miles and miles of it right up to the 
EMBANKMENT, the great and old sea-wall which 
protects the houses of men. You have but to 
eliminate that embankment to imagine what the 
whole countryside must have been like before it 
was raised, and the meaning of the Fens becomes 
clear to you. The Fens were long ago but the 
continuation inland of this sea-morass. The tide 
channels of the marsh were all of one kind, though 
they differed so much in size. Some of these 
channels were small without name ; some a little 
larger, and these had a local name ; others were a 
little larger again, and worthy to be called rivers — 
the Ouse, the Nen, the Welland, the Glen, the 
Witham. But, large or small, they were nothing, 
all of them, but the scouring of tide-channels in 
the light and sodden slime. It was the high tide 
that drowned all this land, the low tide that drained 
it ; and wherever a patch could be found just 
above the influence of the tide or near enough to 
some main channel for the rush and swirl of the 
water to drain the island, there the villages grew. 
Wherever such a patch could be found men built 
their first homes. Sometimes, before men civic, 
came the holy hermits. But man, religious, or 



124 HILLS AND THE SEA 

greedy, or just wandering, crept in after each 
inundation and began to tame the water and 
spread out even here his slow, interminable con- 
quest. So Wisbeach, so March, so Boston grew, 
and so — the oldest of them all — the Isle of Ely. 

The nature of the country (a nature at which 
I had but guessed whenever before this I had 
wandered through it, and which I had puzzled at 
as I viewed its mere history) was quite clear, now 
that I stood upon the wall that fenced it in from 
the salt water. It was easy to see not only what 
judgments had been mistaken, but also in what 
way they had erred. One could see how and why 
the homelessness of the place had been exagger- 
ated. One could see how the level was just above 
(not, as in Holland, below) the mean of the tides. 
One could discover the manner in which communi- 
cation from the open sea was possible. The deeps 
lead out through the sand ; they are but continua- 
tions under water of that tide-scouring which is 
the note of all the place inland, and out, far out, 
we could see the continuation of the river-beds, 
and at their mouths, far into the sea, the sails. 

A man sounding as he went before the north- 
east wind was led by force into the main channels. 
He was *^ shepherded" into Lynn River or Wis- 
beach River or Boston River, according as he 
found the water shoaler to one side or other of his 
boat. So must have come the first Saxon pirates 



SEA-WALL OF THE WASH 125 

from the mainland ; so (hundreds of years later) 
came here our portion of that swarm of Pagans, 
which all but destroyed Europe ; so centuries 
before either of them, in a time of which there 
is no record, the ignorant seafaring men from the 
east and the north must have come right up into 
our island, as the sea itself creeps right up into the 
land through these curious crevices and draughts 
in the Fenland wall. 

Men — at least the men of our race — have made 
everything for themselves ; and they will never 
cease. They continue to extend and possess. It 
is not only the architecture ; it is the very landscape 
of Europe which has been made by Europeans. 
In what way did we begin to form this difficult 
place, which is neither earth nor water, and in 
which we might have despaired ? It was conquered 
by human artifice, of course, somewhat as Frisia 
and the Netherlands, and, as we may believe, the 
great bay of the Cotentin were conquered ; but it 
has certain special characters of its own, and 
these again are due to the value in this place 
of the tides, and to the absence of those natural 
dykes of sand which were, a thousand years ago, 
the beginnings of Holland. 



Two methods, working side by side, have from 
the beginning of human habitation reclaimed the 



126 HILLS AND THE SEA 

Fens. The first has been the canalization, the 
fencing in of the tideways ; the second has been 
the banking out of the general sea. The spring 
tides covered much of this land, and when they 
retired left it drowned. Against their universal 
advancing sheet of water a bank could be made. 
Such a bank cut off the invasion of the hundreds of 
runnels, small and great, by which the more 
ordinary tides that could not cover the surface had 
yet crept into the soil and soaked it through. 

When such a bank had been built, gates, as it 
were, permitted the water to spend its force and 
also to use its ebb and flow for the draining of the 
land beyond. The gates which let the tide pour 
up and down the main ways became the new 
mouths of the main rivers ; inland the course of 
the rivers (which now took all the sea and thus 
became prodigious) were carefully guarded. Even 
before trenches were dug to drain the fields around, 
earth was thrown up on either side of the rivers to 
confine them each to one permanent channel ; nor 
did the level of the rivers rise, or their beds get 
clogged ; the strength of the tide sufficed for the 
deepening of their channels. Into the rivers so 
fortified the other waterways of the Fens were 
conducted. 

By these methods alone much of the land was 
rendered habitable and subject to the plough. 
Probably these methods were enough to make it 



SEA-WALL OF THE WASH 127 

all it was in the Middle Ages. It was only far 
later, almost in our own time, that water was 
gathered by trenches in the lowland beneath the 
rivers and pumped out artificially with mills ; nor 
is it quite certain even now that this method 
(borrowed from Holland) is the best ; for the land, 
as I have said, is above and not below the sea. 

Of these works, whose tradition is immemorial, 
the greatest, of course, are the sea-walls. 

Perhaps the river-walls came first, but the great 
bank which limited and protected the land against 
the sea is also older than any history. 

It is called Roman, and relics of Rome have 
been found in it, but it has not the characteristic 
of Roman work. It runs upon no regular lines ; 
its contour is curved and variable. It is surely far 
older than the Roman occupation. Earth, heaped 
and beaten hard, is the most enduring of things ; 
the tumuli all over England have outlasted even 
the monoliths, and the great defensive mounds at 
Norwich and at Oxford are stronger and clearer cut 
than anything that the Middle Ages have left. 
This bank, which first made Fenland, still stands 
most conspicuous. You may follow it from the 
Nene above Sutton Bridge right over to Lynn 
River, and again northward from Sutton Bridge 
(or rather, from the ferry above it) right round 
outside Long Sutton and Holbeach, and by Fors- 
dyke Bridge and outside Swyneshead ; everywhere 



128 HILLS AND THE SEA 

it encloses and protects the old parishes, and 
everywhere seaward of it the names of the fields 
mark the newest of endeavours. 



We returned from a long wandering upon the 
desolate edges of the sea to the bank which we 
proposed to follow right round to the mouth of the 
Ouse : a bank that runs not straight, but in great 
broken lines, as in old-fashioned fortification, and 
from which far off upon the right one sees the 
famous churches of the Wringland, far ofP upon 
the left a hint beyond the marshes and the sands 
of the very distant open sea. 

A gale had risen with the morning, and while 
it invigorated the travellers in these wastes it 
seemed to increase their loneliness, for it broke 
upon nothing, and it removed the interest of the 
eye from the monotonous sad land to the charge 
and change of the torn sky above, but in a sense 
also it impelled us, as though we were sailing 
before it as it swept along the edge of the bank 
and helped us to forget the interminable hours. 

The birds for whom this estuary is a kind of 
sanctuary and a place of secure food in all weathers, 
the birds swept out in great flocks over the flats 
towards the sea. They were the only companion- 
ship afforded to us upon this long day, and they 
had, or I fancied they had, in their demeanour a 



SEA-WALL OF THE WASH 129 

kind of contempt for the rare human beings they 
might see, as though knowing how little man 
could do upon those sands. They fed all together 
upon the edge of the water, upon the edge of the 
falling tide, very far off, making long bands of 
white that mixed with the tiny breaking wavelets. 
Now and then they rose in bodies, and so rising 
disappeared ; but as they would turn and wheel 
against the wind, seeking some other ground, they 
sent from moment to moment flashes of delicate and 
rare light from the great multitude of their wings. 
I know of nothing to which one may compare these 
glimpses of evanescent shining but these two things 
— the flash of a sword edge and the rapid turning in 
human hands of a diaphanous veil held in the light. 
It shone or glinted for a moment, then they would 
all wheel together and it disappeared. 

So, watching them as a kind of marvel, we saw 
distant across the sea a faint blue tower, and 
recognized it for Boston Stump, so many, many 
miles away. 

But for the birds and this landmark, which never 
left us, all the length of the dyke was empty of any 
sight save the mixing of the sea and the land. Then 
gradually the heights in Norfolk beyond grew 
clearer, a further shore narrowed the expanse of 
waters, and we came to the river mouth of the Ouse, 
and caught sight, up the stream, of the houses 
of a town. 

K 



THE CERDAGNE 

THERE is a part of Europe of which for the 
moment most people have not heard, but 
which in a few years everybody will know ; so 
it is well worth telling before it is changed what 
it is like to-day. It is called the Cerdagne. It is 
a very broad valley, stretching out between hills 
whose height is so incredible — or at least, whose 
appearance of height is so incredible — that when 
they are properly painted no one will believe them 
to be true. Indeed, I know a man who painted them 
just as they are, and those who saw the picture 
said it was fantastic and out of Nature, like 
Turner's drawings. But those who had been with 
him and had seen the place, said that somehow he 
had just missed the effect of height. 

It is remarkable that in any country, even if 
one does not know that country well, what is un- 
usual to the country strikes the traveller at once. 
And so it is with the Cerdagne. For all the 
valleys of the Pyrenees except this one are built 
upon the same plan. They are deep gorges, 
narrowing in two places to gates or profound 

130 



THE CERDAGNE 131 

corridors, one of these places being near the 
crest and one near the plain ; and down these 
valleys fall violent torrents, and in them there is 
only room for tiny villages or very little towns, 
squeezed in between the sheer surfaces of the rock 
or the steep forests. 

So it is with the Valley of Laruns, and with 
that of Meuleon, and with that of Luz, and with 
those of the two Bagn^res, and with the Val d'Aran, 
and with the Val d'Esera, and with the very famous 
Valley of Andorra. 

With valleys so made the mountains are indeed 
more awful than they might be in the Alps ; but 
you never see them standing out and apart, and the 
mastering elevation of the Pyrenees is not appre- 
hended until you come to the cirque or hollow at 
the end of each valley just underneath the main 
ridge ; by that time you have climbed so far that 
you have halved the height of the barrier. 

But the Cerdagne, unlike all the other valleys, 
is as broad as half a county, and is full of towns 
and fields and men and mules and slow rivulets 
and corn ; so, standing upon either side and look- 
ing to the other, you see all together and in 
the large its mountain boundaries. It is like the 
sight of the Grampians from beyond Strathmore, 
but very much more grand. Moreover, as no one 
has written sufficiently about it to prepare the 
traveller for what he is to see (and in attempting 



132 HILLS AND THE SEA 

to do so here I am probably doing wrong, but 
a man must write down what he has seen), the 
Cerdagne breaks upon him quite unexpectedly, and 
his descent into that wealthy plain is the entry into 
a new world. He may have learnt the mountains 
by heart, as we had, in many stumbling marches 
and many nights slept out beneath the trees, and 
many crossings of the main chain by those pre- 
cipitous cols which make the ridge of the Pyrenees 
more like a paling than a mountain crest. But 
though he should know them thoroughly all the 
way from the Atlantic for two hundred miles, the 
Cerdagne will only appear to him the more aston- 
ishing. It renews in any man, however familiar 
he may be with great mountains, the impressions 
of that day when he first saw the distant summits 
and thought them to be clouds. 

Apart from all this, the Cerdagne is full of a 
lively interest, because it preserves far better than 
any other Pyrenean valley those two Pyrenean 
things — the memory of European history and the 
intense local spirit of the Vals. 

The memory of European history is to be seen 
in the odd tricks which the frontier plays. It was 
laid down by the commissioners of Mazarin two 
hundred and fifty years ago, and instead of follow- 
ing the watershed (which would leave the Cerdagne 
all Spanish politically as it is Catalan by language 
and position) it crosses the valley from one side to 



THE CERDAGNE 133 

another, leaving the top end of it and the sources 
of its rivers under French control. 

That endless debate as to whether race or govern- 
ment will most affect a people can here be tested, 
though hardly decided. The villages are Spanish, 
the hour of meals is Spanish, and the wine is 
Spanish wine. But the clocks keep time, and the 
streets are swept, and, oddest of all, the cooking 
is French cooking. The people are Spanish in 
that they are slow to serve you or to find you a 
mount or to show you the way, but they are French 
in that they are punctual in the hour at which they 
have promised to do these things ; and they are 
Spanish in the shapes of their ricks and the nature 
of their implements, but French in the aspect of 
their fields. One might also discuss — it would be 
most profitable of all — where they are Spanish 
and where they are French in their observance of 
religion. 

This freak which the frontier plays in cutting so 
united a countryside into two by an imaginary 
line is further emphasized by an island of Spanish 
territory which has been left stranded, as it were, 
in the midst of the valley. It is called Llivia, and 
is about as large as a large English country parish, 
with a small country town in the middle. 

One comes across the fields from villages where 
the signs and villagers and the very look of the 
surface of the road are French ; one suddenly 



134 HILLS AND THE SEA 

notices Spanish soldiers, Spanish signs, and 
Spanish prices in the streets of the little place ; 
one leaves it, and in five minutes one is in France 
again. It is connected with its own country by a 
neutral road, but it is an island of territory all the 
same, and the reason that it was so left isolated is 
very typical of the spirit of the old regime, with 
its solemn legal pedantry, which we in England 
alone preserve in all Western Europe. For the 
treaty which marked the limits here ceded to the 
French '^the valley and all its villages." The 
Spaniards pleaded that Llivia was not a village 
but a town, and their plea was admitted. 

I began by saying that this wide basin of land, 
with its strong people and its isolated traditions, 
though it was so little known to-day, would soon be 
too well known. So it will be, and the reason is 
this, that the very low pass at one end of it will soon 
be crossed by a railway. It is the only low pass in 
the Pyrenees, and it is so gradual and even (upon 
the Spanish side) that the railway will everywhere 
be above ground. Within perhaps five years it 
will be for the Pyrenees what the Brenner is for 
the Alps, and when that is done any one who has 
read this may go and see for himself whether 
it is not true that from that plain at evening the 
frontier ridge of Andorra seems to be the highest 
thing in the world. 



CARCASSONNE 

CARCASSONNE differs from other monumen- 
tal towns in this : that it preserves exactly the 
aspect of many centuries up to a certain moment, 
and from that moment has '* set," and has suffered 
no further change. You see and touch, as you 
walk along its ramparts, all the generations from 
that crisis in the fifth century when the public 
power was finally despaired of — and after which 
each group of the Western Empire began to see to 
its own preservation — down to that last achievement 
of the thirteenth, when medieval civilization had 
reached its full flower and was ready for the decline 
that followed the death of St. Louis and the extinc- 
tion of the German phantasy of empire. 

No other town can present so vivid and clean-cut 
a fossil of the seven hundred years into which 
poured and melted all the dissolution of antiquity, 
and out of which was formed or crystallized the 
highly specialized diversity of our modern Europe. 

In the fascination of extreme age many English 
sites are richer ; Winchester and Canterbury may 
be quoted from among a hundred. In the super- 
imposition of age upon age of human history, 

I3S 



136 HILLS AND THE SEA 

Aries and Rome are far more surprising. In 
historic continuity most European towns surpass 
it, from Paris, whose public justice, worship, and 
markets have kept to the same site for quite sixteen 
centuries, to London, of which the city at least 
preserves upon three sides the Roman limit. But 
no town can of its nature give as does Carcas- 
sonne this overwhelming impression of survival or 
resurrection. 

The attitude and position of Carcassonne en- 
force its character. Up above the river, but a 
little set back from the valley, right against the 
dawn as you come to it from Toulouse through the 
morning, stands a long, steep, and isolated rock, 
the whole summit of which from the sharp cliff 
on the north to that other on the south is doubled 
in height by what seems one vast wall — and more 
than twenty towers. Indeed, it is at such a time, 
in early morning, and best in winter when the 
frost defines and chisels every outline, that Car- 
cassonne should be drawn. You then see it in 
a band of dark blue-grey, all even in texture, 
serrated and battlemented and towered, with the 
metallic shining of the dawn behind it. 

So to have seen it makes it very difficult to write 
of it or even to paint ; what one wishes to do is 
rather to work it out in enamel upon a surface of 
bronze. This rock, wholly covered with the works 



CARCASSONNE 137 

of the city, stands looking at the Pyrenees and 
holding the only level valley between the Medi- 
terranean and the Garonne, and even if one had 
read nothing concerning it one would understand 
why it has filled all the legends of the return of 
armies from Spain, why Victor Hugo could not 
rest from the memory of it, and why it is so 
strongly woven in with the story of Charlemagne. 

There is another and better reason for the quality 
of Carcassonne, and that is the act, to which I 
can recall no perfect parallel in Christian history, 
by which St. Louis turned what had been a living 
town into a mere stronghold. Every inhabitant 
of Carcassonne was transferred, not to suburbs, but 
right beyond the river, a mile and more away, to 
the site of that delightful town which is the 
Carcassonne of maps and railways, the place where 
the seventeenth century meets you in graceful 
ornaments, and where is, to my certain knowledge, 
the best inn south of parallel 45. St. Louis turned 
the rock into a mere stronghold, strengthened it, 
built new towers, and curtained them into that un- 
surpassable masonry of the central Middle Ages 
which you may yet admire in Aigues-Mortes and 
in Carnarvon. 

This political act, the removal of a whole city, 
may have been accomplished in many other places; 
it is certainly recorded of many : but, for the 
moment at least, I can remember none except 



138 HILLS AND THE SEA 

Carcassonne in which its consequences have 
remained. To this many causes have contributed, 
but chiefly this, that the new town was transferred 
to the open plain from the trammels of a narrow 
plateau, just at the moment when all the towns of 
Western Europe were growing and breaking their 
bonds ; just after the principal cities of North- 
western Europe had got their charters, and when 
Paris (the typical municipality of that age as of our 
own) was trebling its area and its population. 

The transference of the population once accom- 
plished, the rock and towers of Carcassonne ceased 
to change and to grow. Humanity was gone. 
The fortress was still of great value in war ; the 
Black Prince attempted its destruction, and it is 
only within living memory that it ceased to be set 
down on maps (and in Government offices !) as a 
fortified place : but the necessity for immediate 
defence, and the labour which would have re- 
modelled it, had disappeared. There had dis- 
appeared also that eager and destructive activity 
which accompanies any permanent gathering of 
French families. The new town on the plain 
changed perpetually, and is changing still. It has 
lost almost everything of the Middle Ages ; it 
carries, by a sort of momentum, a flavour of Louis 
XIV, but the masons are at it as they are every- 
where, from the Channel to the Mediterranean ; 
for to pull down and rebuild is the permanent 



CARCASSONNE 139 

recreation of the French. The rock remains. It 
is put in order whenever a stone falls out of place 
— no one of weight has talked nonsense here 
against restoration, for the sense of the past is 
too strong — but though it is minutely and con- 
tinually repaired, Old Carcassonne does not 
change. There is no other set of walls in Europe 
of which this is true. 



Walking round the circuit of these walls and 
watching from their height the long line of the 
mountains, one is first held by that modern subject, 
the landscape, or that still more modern fascina- 
tion of great hills. Next one feels what the 
Middle Ages designed of mass and weight and 
height, and wonders by what accident of the mind 
they so succeeded in suggesting infinity : one re- 
members Beauvais, which is infinitely high at 
evening, and the tower of Portrut, which seems 
bigger than any hill. 

But when these commoner emotions are passed, 
one comes upon a very different thing. A little 
tower there, jutting out perilously from the wall, 
shows three courses of a small red brick set in a 
mortar-like stone. When I saw this kind of 
building I went close up and touched it with my 
hand. It was Roman. I knew the signal well. 
I had seen that brick, and picked it loose from an 



140 HILLS AND THE SEA 

Arab stable on the edge of the Sahara, and I had 
seen it jutting through moss on the high moors of 
Northumberland. I know a man who reverently- 
brought home to Sussex such another, which he 
had found unbroken far beyond Damascus upon 
the Syrian sand. 

It is easy to speak of the Empire and to say 
that it established its order from the Tyne to 
the Euphrates ; but when one has travelled alone 
and on foot up and down the world and seen its 
vastness and its complexity, and yet everywhere 
the unity even of bricks in their courses, then one 
begins to understand the name of Rome. 



LYNN 

EVERY man that lands in Lynn feels all 
through him the antiquity and the call of 
the town ; but especially if he comes, as I came in 
with another man in springtime, from the miles 
and miles of emptiness and miles of bending 
grass and the shouting of the wind. After that 
morning, in which one had been a little point on 
an immense plane, with the gale not only above 
one, as it commonly is, but all around one as it is 
at sea ; and after having steeped one's mind in the 
peculiar loneliness which haunts a stretch of ill- 
defined and wasted shore, the narrow, varied, and 
unordered streets of the port enhance the creations 
of man and emphasize his presence. 

Words so few are necessarily obscure. Let me 
expand them. I mean that the unexpected turning 
of the ways in such a port is perpetually revealing 
something new ; that the little spaces frame, as it 
were, each unexpected sight : thus at the end of a 
street one will catch a patch of the Fens beyond 
the river, a great moving sail, a cloud, or the 
sculptured corner of an excellent house. 

141 



142 HILLS AND THE SEA 

The same history also that permitted continual 
encroachment upon the public thoroughfares and 
that built up a gradual High Street upon the line 
of some cow-track leading from the fields to the 
ferry, the spirit that everywhere permitted the 
powerful or the cunning to withstand authority — 
that history (which is the history of all our little 
English towns) has endowed Lynn with an endless 
diversity. 

It is not only that the separate things in such 
towns are delightful, nor only that one comes 
upon them suddenly, but also that these separate 
things are so many. They have characters as men 
have. There is nothing of that repetition which 
must accompany the love of order and the presence 
of strong laws. The similar insistent forms which 
go with a strong civilization, as they give it 
majesty, so they give it also gloom, and a heavy 
feeling of finality : these are quite lacking here in 
England, where the poor have for so long sub- 
mitted to the domination of the rich, and the rich 
have dreaded and refused a central government. 
Everything that goes with the power of individuals 
has added peculiarity and meaning to all the stones 
of Lynn. Moreover, a quality whose absence all 
men now deplore was once higher in England 
than anywhere else, save, perhaps, in the northern 
Italian hills. I mean ownership, and what comes 
from ownership — the love of home. 



LYNN 143 

You can see the past effect of ownership and 
individuality in Lynn as clearly as you can catch 
affection or menace in a human voice. The out- 
ward expression is most manifest, and to pass in 
and out along the lanes in front of the old houses 
inspires in one precisely those emotions which are 
aroused by a human crowd. 

All the roofs of Lynn and all its pavements are 
worthy (as though they were living beings) of 
individual names. 

Along the river shore, from the race of the 
ebb that had so nearly drowned me many years 
before, I watched the walls that mark the edge of 
the town against the Ouse, and especially that 
group towards which the ferry-boat was struggling 
against the eddy and tumble of the tide. 

They were walls of every age, not high, brick of 
a dozen harmonious tones, with the accidents, 
corners, and breaches of perhaps seven hundred 
years. Beyond, to the left, down the river, stood 
the masts in the new docks that were built to pre- 
serve the trade of this difficult port. Up-river, great 
new works of I know not what kind stood like a 
bastion against the plain; and in between ran these 
oldest bits of Lynn, somnolescent and refreshing 
— permanent. 

The lanes up from the Ouse when I landed I 
found to be of a slow and natural growth, with that 
slight bend to them that comes, I believe, from the 



144 HILLS AND THE SEA 

drying of fishing-nets. For it is said that courts 
of this kind grew up in our sea-towns all round our 
eastern and the southern coast in such a manner. 
It happened thus : 

The town would begin upon the highest of the 
bank, for it was flatter for building, drier and 
easier to defend than that part next to the water. 
Down from the town to the shore the fishermen 
would lay out their nets to dry. How nets look 
when they are so laid, their narrowness and the 
curve they take, everybody knows. Then on the 
spaces between the nets shanties would be built, 
or old boats turned upside down for shelter, so 
that the curing of fish and the boiling of tar and 
the serving and parcelling of ropes could be done 
under cover. Then as the number of people 
grew, the squatters' land got value, and houses 
were raised (you will find many small freeholds 
in such rows to this day), but the lines of the 
net remained in the alley -ways between the 
houses. 

All this I was told once by an old man who 
helped me to take my boat down Breydon. He 
wore trousers of a brick-red, and the stuff of them 
as thick as boards, and had on also a very thick 
jersey and a cap of fur. He was shaved upon his 
lips and chin, but all round the rest of his face 
was a beard. He smoked a tiny pipe, quite black, 
and upon matters within his own experience he 



LYNN 145 

was a great liar ; but upon matters of tradition I 
was willing to believe him. 

Within the town, when I had gained it from 
that lane which has been the ferry-lane, I suppose, 
since the ferry began, age and distinction were 
everywhere. 

Where else, thought I, in England could you 
say that nine years would make no change? 
Whether, indeed, the Globe had that same wine 
of the nineties I could not tell, for the hour was 
not congenial to wine ; but if it has some store 
of its Burgundy left from those days it must 
be better still by now, for Burgundy wine takes 
nine years to mature, for nine years remains in the 
plenitude of its powers, and for nine years more 
declines into an honourable age ; and this is also 
true of claret, but in claret it goes by sevens. 



The open square of the town, which one looks 
at from the Globe, gives one a mingled pleasure 
of reminiscence and discovery. It breaks on one 
abruptly. It is as wide as a pasture field, and 
all the houses are ample and largely founded. 
Indeed, throughout this country, elbow-room — the 
sense that there is space enough and to spare in 
such flats and under an open sky — has filled the 
minds of builders. You may see it in all the 
inland towns of the Fens ; and one found it again 



146 HILLS AND THE SEA 

here upon the further bank, upon the edge of the 
Fens ; for though Lynn is just off the Fens, yet it 
looks upon their horizon and their sky, and belongs 
to them in spirit. 

In this large and comfortable square a very 
steadfast and most considerable English bank is to 
be discovered. It is of honest brown brick ; its 
architecture is of the plainest ; its appearance is 
such that its credit could never fail, and that the 
house alone by its presence could conduct a digni- 
fied business for ever. The rooms in it are so 
many and so great that the owners of such a bank 
(having become princes by its success) could 
inhabit them with a majesty worthy of their new 
title. But who lives above his shop since Richard- 
son died ? And did old Richardson ? Lord knows ! 
.... Anyhow, the bank is glorious, and it is 
but one of the fifty houses that I saw in Lynn. 

Thus, in the same street as the Globe, was a 
fa9ade of stone. If it was Georgian, it was very 
early Georgian, for it was relieved with ornaments 
of a delicate and accurate sort, and the proportions 
were exactly satisfying to the eye that looked on it. 
The stone also was of that kind (Portland stone, I 
think) which goes black and white with age, and 
which is better suited than any other to the English 
climate. 

In another house near the church I saw a roof 
that might have been the roof for a town. It 



LYNN 147 

covered the living part and the stables, and the 
outhouse and the brewhouse, and the barns, and 
for all I know the pig-pens and the pigeons* as 
well. It was a benediction of a roof — a roof tra- 
ditional, a roof patriarchal, a roof customary, a 
roof of permanence and unity, a roof that physic- 
ally sheltered and spiritually sustained, a roof 
majestic, a roof eternal. In a word, it was a roof 
catholic. 

And what, thought I, is paid yearly in this town 
for such a roof as that ? I do not know ; but I 
know of another roof at Goudhurst, in Kent, which 
would have cost me less than ;^ioo a year, only I 
could not get it for love or money. 

There is also in Lynn a Custom House not 
very English, but very beautiful. The faces carved 
upon it were so vivid that I could not but believe 
them to have been carved in the Netherlands, and 
from this Custom House looks down the pinched, 
unhappy face of that narrow gentleman whom the 
great families destroyed — James II. 

There is also in Lynn what I did not know was 
to be seen out of Sussex — a Tudor building of 
chipped flints, and on it the mouldering arms of 
Elizabeth. 

The last Gothic of this Bishop's borough which 
the King seized from the Church clings to chance 
houses in little carven masks and occasional ogives : 
there is everywhere a feast for whatever in the 



148 HILLS AND THE SEA 

mind is curious, searching, and reverent, and over 
the town, as over all the failing ports of our silting 
eastern seaboard, hangs the air of a great past 
time, the influence of the Baltic and the Lowlands. 



For these ancient places do not change, they 

permit themselves to stand apart and to repose, 

and — by paying that price — almost alone of all 

things in England they preserve some historic 

continuity, and satisfy the memories in one's 

blood. 

• ••••• 

So having come round to the Ouse again, and 
to the edge of the Fens at Lynn, I went off at 
random whither next it pleased me to go. 



THE GUNS 

I HAD slept perhaps seven hours when a lan- 
tern woke me, flashed in my face, and I won- 
dered confusedly why there was straw in my bed ; 
then I remembered that I was not in bed at all, but 
on manoeuvres. I looked up and saw a sergeant 
with a bit of paper in his hand. He was giving 
out orders, and the little light he carried sparkled 
on the gold of his great dark-blue coat. 

** You, the Englishman," he said (for that was 
what they called me as a nickname), **go with 
the gunners to-day. Where is Labbe ? " 

Labbe (that man by profession a cook, by in- 
clination a marquis, and now by destiny a very 
good driver of guns) the day before had gone on 
foot. To-day he was to ride. I pointed him out 
where he lay still sleeping. The sergeant stirred 
him about with his foot, and said, ** Facte and 
Basilique"; and Labb6 grunted. In this simple 
way every one knew his duty — Labbe that he had 
another hour's sleep and more, and that he was 
to take my horses : I, that I must rise and get off 
to the square. 

149 



150 HILLS AND THE SEA 

Then the sergeant went out of the barn, cursing 
the straw on his spurs, and I lit a match and 
brushed down my clothes and ran off to the square. 
It was not yet two in the morning. 

The gunners were drawn up in a double line, 
and we reserve drivers stood separate (there were 
only a dozen of us), and when they formed fours 
we were at the tail. There was a lieutenant with 
us and a sergeant, also two bombardiers — all 
mounted ; and so we went off, keeping step till we 
were out of the town, and then marching as we 
chose and thanking God for the change. For it is 
no easy matter for drivers to march with gunners ; 
their swords impede them, and though the French 
drivers have not the ridiculous top-boots that 
theatricalize other armies, yet even their simple 
boots are not well-suited for the road. 

This custom of sending forward reserve drivers, 
on foot, in rotation, has a fine name to it. It is 
called ** Haut-le-pied," *^ High-the-foot," and must 
therefore be old. 

A little way out of the town we had leave to 
sing, and we began, all together, one of those 
long and charming songs with which the French 
soldiery make-believe to forget the tedium of the 
road and the hardship of arms. 

Now, if a man desired to answer once and for 
all those pedants who refuse to understand the 
nature of military training (both those who make 



THE GUNS 151 

a silly theatre-show of it and those who make it 
hideous and diabolical), there could be no better 
way than to let him hear the songs of soldiers. In 
the French service, at least, these songs are a whole 
expression of the barrack-room ; its extreme coarse- 
ness, its steady and perpetual humour, its hatred 
of the hard conditions of discipline ; and also 
these songs continually portray the distant but 
delightful picture of things — I mean of things 
rare and far off— which must lie at the back of 
men's minds when they have much work to do 
with their hands and much living in the open air 
and no women to pour out their wine. 

Moreover, these songs have another excellent 
quality. They show all through that splendid un- 
consciousness of the soldier, that inability in him 
to see himself from without, or to pose as civilians 
always think and say he poses. 

We sang that morning first, the chief and oldest 
of the songs. It dates from the Flemish wars of 
Louis XIV, and is called ** Aupres de ma Blonde." 
Every one knows the tune. Then we sang ^*The 
Song of the Miller," and then many other songs, 
each longer than the last. For these songs, unlike 
other lyrics, have it for an object to string out as 
many verses as possible in order to kill the endless 
straight roads and the weariness. 

We had need to sing. No sun rose, but the 
day broke over an ugly plain with hardly any 



152 HILLS AND THE SEA 

trees, and that grey and wretched dawn came in 
with a cold and dispiriting rain unrefreshed by 
wind. Colson, who was a foolish little man (the 
son of a squire), marching by my side, wondered 
where and how we should be dried that day. 
The army was for ever producing problems for 
Colson, and I was often his comforter. He liked 
to talk to me and hear about England, and the rich 
people and their security, and how they never 
served as soldiers (from luxury), and how (what he 
could not understand) the poor had a bargain 
struck with them by the rich whereby they also 
need not serve. I could learn from him the mean- 
ing of many French words which I did not yet 
know. He had some little education ; had I asked 
the more ignorant men of my battery, they would 
only have laughed, but he had read, in common 
books, of the differences between nations, and 
could explain many things to me. 

Colson, then, complaining of the rain, and won- 
dering where he should get dried, I told him to 
consider not so much the happy English, but 
rather his poor scabbard and how he should clean 
it after the march, and his poor clothes, all coated 
with mud, and needing an hour's brushing, and 
his poor temper, which, if he did not take great 
care, would make him grow up to be an anti- 
militarist and a byword. 

So we wrangled, and it still rained. Our songs 



THE GUNS 153 

grew rarer, and there was at last no noise but the 
slush of all those feet beating the muddy road, and 
the occasional clank of metal as a scabbard touched 
some other steel, or a slung carbine struck the hilt 
of a bayonet. It was well on in the morning when 
the guns caught us up and passed us ; the drivers 
all shrouded in their coats and bending forward in 
the rain ; the guns coated and splashed with 
thick mud, and the horses also, threatened hours of 
grooming. I looked mine up and down as Labbe 
passed on them, and I groaned, for it is a rule that 
a man grooms his own horses whether he has 
ridden them or no, and after all, day in and day 
out, it works fair. The guns disappeared into the 
mist of rain, and we went on through more hours 
of miserable tramping, seeing no spire ahead of us, 
and unable to count on a long halt. 

Still, as we went, I noticed that we were on 
some great division, between provinces perhaps, 
or between river valleys, for in France there are 
many bare upland plateaus dividing separate dis- 
tricts ; and it is a feature of the country that the 
districts so divided have either formed separate 
provinces in the past or, at any rate (even if they 
have not had political recognition), have stood, 
and do still stand, for separate units in French 
society. It was more apparent with every mile as 
we went on that we were approaching new things. 
The plain was naked save for rare planted trees. 



154 HILLS AND THE SEA 

and here and there, a long way off (on the horizon, 
it seemed) a farm or two, unprotected and alone. 

The rain ceased, and the steady grey sky broke 
a little as we marched on, still in silence, and by 
this time thirsty and a little dazed. A ravine 
opened in a bare plateau, and we saw that it held 
a little village. They led us into it, down a short 
steep bit of road, and lined us up by a great basin 
of sparkling water, and every man was mad to 
break ranks and drink ; but no one dared. The 
children of the village gathered in a little group 
and looked at us, and we envied their freedom. 
When we had stood thus for a quarter of an hour 
or so, an orderly came riding in all splashed, and 
his horse's coat rough with the rain and steaming 
up into the air. He came up to the lieutenant in 
command and delivered an order ; then he rode 
away fast northward along the ravine and out of 
the village. The lieutenant, when he had gone, 
formed us into a little column, and we, who had 
expected to dismiss at any moment, were full of 
anger, and were sullen to find that by some 
wretched order or other we had to take another 
hour of the road : first we had to go back four 
miles along the road we had already come, and 
then to branch off perpendicular to our general 
line of march, and (as it seemed to us) quite out of 
our way. 

It is a difficult thing to move a great mass of 



THE GUNS 155 

men through a desolate country by small units 
and leave them dependent on the country, and it 
is rather wonderful that they do it so neatly and 
effect the junctions so well ; but the private soldier, 
who stands for those little black blocks on the 
military map, has a boy's impatience in him ; and 
a very wise man, if he wishes to keep an army in 
spirit, will avoid counter-marching as much as he 
can, for — I cannot tell why — nothing takes the 
heart out of a man like having to plod over again 
the very way he has just come. So, when we had 
come to a very small village in the waste and 
halted there, finding our guns and drivers already 
long arrived, we made an end of a dull and mean- 
ingless day — very difficult to tell of, because the 
story is merely a record of fatigue. But in a 
diary of route everything must be set down faith- 
fully ; and so I have set down all this sodden and 
empty day. 

That night I sat at a peasant's table and heard 
my four stable-companions understanding every- 
thing, and evidently in their world and at home, 
although they were conscripts. This turned me 
silent, and I sat away from the light, looking at 
the fire and drying myself by its logs. As I heard 
their laughter I remembered Sussex and the woods 
above Arun, and I felt myself to be in exile. 
Then we slept in beds, and the goodwife had our 
tunics dry by morning, for she also had a son in 



156 HILLS AND THE SEA 

the service, who was a long way off at Lyons, and 

was not to return for two years. 

• • • • • • • 

There are days in a long march when a man is 
made to do too much, and others when he is made 
to do what seems meaningless, doubling backward 
on his road, as we had done ; there are days when 
he seems to advance very little ; but they are not 
days of repose, for they are full of halting and 
doubts and special bits of work. Such a day had 
come to us with the next dawn. 

The reason of all these things — I mean, of the 
over-long marches, of the counter-marches, and of 
the short days — was the complexity of the only 
plan by which a great number of men and guns 
can be taken from one large place to another with- 
out confusion by the way — living, as they must do, 
upon the country, and finding at the end of every 
march water and hay for the horses, food and some 
kind of shelter for the men. And this plan, as I 
have said before, consists (in a European country) 
in dividing your force, marching by roads more or 
less parallel, and converging, after some days, on 
the object of the march. 

It is evident that in a somewhat desolate region 
of small and distant hamlets the front will be 
broader and the columns smaller, but when a large 
town stands in the line of march, advantage will be 
taken of it to mass one's men. 



THE GUNS 157 

Such a town was Bar-le-Duc, and it was because 
our battery was so near to it that this fourth day- 
was a short march of less than eight miles. 

They sent the gunners in early ; we drivers 
started later than usual, and the pace was smart at 
first under a happy morning sun, but still around 
us were the bare fields, all but treeless, and the 
road was part of the plain, not divided by hedges. 
The bombardier trotted by my side and told me of 
the glories of Rheims, which was his native town. 
He was a mild man, genial and good, and little 
apt for promotion. He interlarded his conversation 
with official remarks to show a zeal he never felt, 
telling one man that his traces were slack, and 
another that his led-horse was shirking, and after 
each official remark he returned up abeam of me 
to tell me more of the riches and splendour of 
Rheims. He chose me out for this favour because 
I already knew the countryside of the upper 
Champagne, and had twice seen his city. He 
promised me that when we got our first leave from 
camp he would show me many sights in the town ; 
but this he said hoping that I would pay for the 
entertainment, as indeed I did. 

We did not halt, nor did we pass the gunners 
that morning; but when we had gone about four 
miles or so the road began to descend through a 
wide gully, and we saw before us the secluded 
and fruitful valley of the Meuse. It is here of an 



158 HILLS AND THE SEA 

even width for miles, bounded by regular low hills. 
We were coming down the eastern wall of that 
valley, and on the parallel western side a similar 
height, with similar ravines and gullies leading 
down to the river, bounded our narrow view. I 
caught the distant sound of trumpets up there 
beyond us, and nearer was the unmistakable 
rumble of the guns. The clatter of horses below 
in the valley road and the shouting of commands 
were the signs that the regiment was meeting. 
The road turned. On a kind of platform, just 
before it joined the main highway, a few feet 
above it, we halted to wait our order — and we saw 
the guns go by ! 

Only half the regiment was to halt at Bar-le-Duc. 
But six batteries, thirty-six guns, their men, 
horses, apparatus, forges, and waggons occupying 
and advancing in streams over a valley are a 
wonderful sight. Clouds of dust and the noise of 
metal woke the silent places of the Meuse, and 
sometimes river birds would rise and wheel in the 
air as the clamour neared them. Far off a lonely 
battery was coming down the western slope to join 
the throng in its order, and for some reason their 
two trumpets were still playing the march and 
lending to this great display the unity of music. 
We dismounted and watched from the turf of the 
roadside a pageant which the accident of an 
ordered and servile life afforded us; for it is true 



THE GUNS 159 

of armies that the compensation of their drudgery 
and miserable subjection is the continual opportu- 
nity of these large emotions ; and not only by their 
vastness and arrangement, but by the very fact that 
they merge us into themselves, do armies widen the 
spirit of a man and give it communion with the 
majesty of great numbers. One becomes a part 
of many men. 

The seventh battery, with which we had little to 
do (for in quarters they belonged to the furthest 
corner from our own), first came by and passed 
us, with that interminable repetition of similar 
things which is the note of a force on the march, 
and makes it seem like a river flowing. We 
recognized it by the figure of one Chevalier, a 
major attached to them. He was an absent-minded 
man of whom many stories were told — kindly, with 
a round face; and he wore eye-glasses, either for 
the distinction they afforded or because he was 
short of sight. The seventh passed us, and their 
forge and waggon ended the long train. A regula- 
tion space between them and the next allowed the 
dust to lie a little, and then the ninth came by; we 
knew them well, because in quarters they were our 
neighbours. At their head was their captain, 
whose name was Levy. He was a Jew, small, 
very sharp-featured, and a man who worked 
astonishingly hard. He was very popular with 
his men, and his battery was happy and boasted. 



160 HILLS AND THE SEA 

He cared especially for their food, and would go 
into their kitchen daily to taste the soup. He was 
also a silent man. He sat his horse badly, bent 
and crouched, but his eyes were very keen ; and he 
again was a character of whom the men talked and 
told stories. I believe he was something of a 
mathematician ; but we knew little of such things 
where our superiors were concerned. 

As the ninth battery passed us we were given 
the order to mount, and knew that our place came 
next. The long-drawn Ha-a-lte ! and the lifted 
swords down the road contained for a while the 
batteries that were to follow, and we filed out of 
our side road into the long gap they had left us. 
Then, taking up the trot ourselves, we heard the 
order passing down infinitely till it was lost in 
the length of the road ; the trumpets galloped 
past us and formed at the head of the column ; a 
much more triumphant noise of brass than we had 
yet heard heralded us with a kind of insolence, 
and the whole train with its two miles and more of 
noisy power gloried into the old town of Bar-le- 
Duc, to the great joy of its young men and 
women at the windows, to the annoyance of the 
householders, to the stupefaction of the old, and 
doubtless to the ultimate advantage of the Re- 
public. 

When we had formed park in the grey market- 
square, ridden our horses off to water at the 



THE GUNS 161 

river and to their quarters, cleaned kit and har- 
ness, and at last were free — that is, when it was 
already evening — Matthieu, a friend of mine who 
had come by another road with his battery, met 
me strolling on the bridge. Matthieu was of my 
kind, he had such a lineage as I had and such an 
education. We were glad to meet. He told me 
of his last halting-place — Pagny — hidden on the 
upper river. It is the place where the house of 
Luxembourg are buried, and some also of the 
great men who fell when Henry V of England 
was fighting in the North, and when on this flank 
the Eastern dukes were waging the Burgundian 
wars. It was not the first time that the tumult of 
men in arms had made echoes along the valley. 

Matthieu and I went off together to dine. He 
lent me a pin of his, a pin with a worked head, to 
pin my tunic with where it was torn, and he 
begged me to give it back to him. But I have it 
still, for I have never seen him since ; nor shall I 
see him, nor he me, till the Great Day. 



M 



THE LOOE STREAM 

OF the complexity of the sea, and of how it is 
manifold, and of how it mixes up with a 
man, and may broaden or perfect him, it would be 
very tempting to write ; but if one once began on 
this, one would be immeshed and drowned in the 
metaphysic, which never yet did good to man nor 
beast. For no one can eat or drink the meta- 
physic, or take any sustenance out of it, and it has 
no movement or colour, and it does not give one 
joy or sorrow ; one cannot paint it or hear it, and 
it is too thin to swim about in. Leaving, then, all 
these general things, though they haunt me and 
tempt me, at least I can deal little by little and 
picture by picture with that sea which is per- 
petually in my mind, and let those who will draw 
what philosophies they choose. And the first 
thing I would like to describe is that of a place 
called the Looe Stream, through which in a boat 
only the other day I sailed for the first time, 
noticing many things. 

When St. Wilfrid went through those bare 
heaths and coppices, which were called the forest 

162 



THE LOOE STREAM 163 

of Anderida, and which lay all along under the 
Surrey Downs, and through which there was a 
long, deserted Roman road, and on this road a 
number of little brutish farms and settlements (for 
this was twelve hundred years ago), he came out 
into the open under the South Downs, and crossed 
my hills and came to the sea plain, and there he 
found a kind of Englishman more savage than the 
rest, though Heaven knows they were none of them 
particularly refined or gay. From these English- 
men the noble people of Sussex are descended. 

Already the rest of England had been Christian 
a hundred years when St. Wilfrid came down into 
the sea plain, and found, to his astonishment, this 
sparse and ignorant tribe. They were living in 
the ruins of the Roman palaces ; they were too 
stupid to be able to use any one of the Roman 
things they had destroyed. They had kept, per- 
haps, some few of the Roman women, certainly all 
the Roman slaves. They had, therefore, vague 
memories of how the Romans tilled the land. 

But those memories were getting worse and 
worse, for it was nearly two hundred years since 
the ships of Aella had sailed into Shoreham (which 
showed him to be a man of immense determination, 
for it is a most difficult harbour, and there were 
then no piers and lights) — it was nearly two hundred 
years, and there was only the least little glimmering 
twilight left of the old day. These barbarians 



164 HILLS AND THE SEA 

were going utterly to pieces, as barbarians ever 
will when they are cut off from the life and 
splendour of the South. They had become so 
cretinous and idiotic, that when St. Wilfrid came 
wandering among them they did not know how to 
get food. There was a famine, and as their 
miserable religion, such as it was (probably it was 
very like these little twopenny-halfpenny modern 
heresies of their cousins, the German pessimists) 
— their religion, I say, not giving them the jolly 
energy which all decent Western religion gives a 
man, they being also by the wrath of God deprived 
of the use of wine (though tuns upon tuns of it 
were waiting for them over the sea a little way off, 
but probably they thought their horizon was the 
end of the world) — their religion, I say, being of 
this nature, they had determined, under the 
pressure of that famine which drove them so hard, 
to put an end to themselves, and St. Wilfrid saw 
them tying themselves together in bands (which 
shows that they knew at least how to make rope) 
and jumping off the cliffs into the sea. This 
practice he determined to oppose. 

He went to their king — who lived in Chichester, I 
suppose, or possibly at Bramber — and asked him 
why the people were going on in this fashion, who 
said to him : ** It is because of the famine." 

St. Wilfrid, shrugging his shoulders, said: 
* ' Why do they not eat fish ? " 



THE LOOE STREAM 165 

** Because," said the King, **fish, swimming 
about in the water, are almost impossible to catch. 
We have tried it in our hunger a hundred times, 
but even when we had the good luck to grasp one 
of them, the slippery thing would glide from our 
fingers." 

St. Wilfrid then in some contempt said again : 

^* Why do you not make nets? " 

And he explained the use of nets to the whole 
Court, preaching, as it were, a sermon upon nets 
to them, and craftily introducing St. Peter and 
that great net which they hang outside his tomb in 
Rome upon his feast day — which is the 29th of 
June. The King and his Court made a net and 
threw it into the sea, and brought out a great mass 
of fish. They were so pleased that they told St. 
Wilfrid they would do anything he asked. He 
baptized them and they made him their first bishop ; 
and he took up his residence in Selsey, and since 
then the people of Sussex have gone steadily for- 
ward, increasing in every good thing, until they 
are now by far the first and most noble of all the 
people in the world. 

There is I know not what in history, or in the 
way in which it is taught, which makes people 
imagine that it is something separate from the life 
they are living, and because of this modern error, 
you may very well be wondering what on earth 
this true story of the foundation of our country has 



166 HILLS AND THE SEA 

to do with the Looe Stream. It has everything to 
do with it. The sea, being governed by a pagan 
god, made war at once, and began eating up all 
those fields which had specially been consecrated 
to the Church, civilization, common sense, and 
human happiness. It is still doing so, and I know 
an old man who can remember a forty-acre field 
all along by Clymping having been eaten up by 
the sea; and out along past Rustington there is, 
about a quarter of a mile from the shore, a rock, 
called the Church Rock, the remains of a church 
which quite a little time ago people used for all 
the ordinary purposes of a church. 

The sea then began to eat up Selsey. Before 
the Conquest — though I cannot remember exactly 
when — the whole town had gone, and they 
had to remove the cathedral to Chichester. In 
Henry VIII's time there was still a park left out 
of the old estates, a park with trees in it ; but this 
also the sea has eaten up ; and here it is that I 
come to the Looe Stream. The Looe Stream is a 
little dell that used to run through that park, and 
which to-day, right out at sea, furnishes the only 
gate by which ships can pass through the great 
maze of banks and rocks which go right out to sea 
from Selsey Bill, miles and miles, and are called 
the Owers. 

On the chart that district is still called **The 
Park," and at very low tides stumps of the old 



THE LOOE STREAM 167 

trees can be seen ; and for myself I believe, though 
I don't think it can be proved, that in among the 
masses of sand and shingle which go together to 
make the confused dangers of the Owers you 
would find the walls of Roman palaces, and heads 
of bronze and marble, and fragments of mosaic and 
coins of gold. 

The tide coming up from the Channel finds, 
rising straight out of the bottom of the sea, the 
shelf of this old land, and it has no avenue by 
which to pour through save this Looe Stream, 
which therefore bubbles and runs like a mill-race, 
though it is in the middle of the sea. 

If you did not know what was underneath you, 
you could not understand why this river should run 
separate from the sea all round, but when you have 
noticed the depths on the chart, you see a kind of 
picture in your mind : the wall of that old mass of 
land standing feet above the floor of the Channel, 
and the top of what was once its fields and its 
villas, and its great church almost awash at low 
tides, and through it a cleft, which was, I say, a 
dell in the old park, but is now that Looe Stream 
buoyed upon either side, and making a river by 
itself running in the sea. 

Sailing over it, and remembering all these things 
at evening, I got out of the boil and tumble into 
deep water. It got darker, and the light on the Nah 
ship showed clearly a long way off, and purple 



168 HILLS AND THE SEA 

against the west stood the solemn height of the 
island. I set a course for this light, being alone at 
the tiller, while my two companions slept down 
below. When the night was full the little variable 
air freshened into a breeze from the south-east ; it 
grew stronger and stronger, and lifted little hearty- 
following seas, and blowing on my quarter drove 
me quickly to the west, whither I was bound. The 
night was very warm and very silent, although 
little patches of foam murmured perpetually, and 
though the wind could be heard lightly in the 
weather shrouds. 

The star Jupiter shone brightly just above my 
wake, and over Selsey Bill, through a flat band of 
mist, the red moon rose slowly, enormous. 



RONCESVALLES 

SITTING one day in Pampeluna, which occupies 
the plain just below the southern and Spanish 
escarpment of the Pyrenees, I and another remem- 
bered with an equal desire that we had all our 
lives desired to see Roncesvalles and the place 
where Roland died. This town (we said) was that 
which Charlemagne destroyed upon his march to 
the Pass, and I, for my part, desired here, as in 
every other part of Europe where I had been able 
to find his footsteps, to follow them, and so to 
re-create his time. 

The road leads slantwise through the upper 
valleys of Navarre, crossing by passes the various 
spurs of the mountains, but each pass higher than 
the last and less frequented, for each is nearer the 
main range. As you leave Pampeluna the road 
grows more and more deserted, and the country 
through which it cuts more wild. The advantages 
of wealth which are conferred by the neighbour- 
hood of the capital of Navarre are rapidly lost 
as one proceeds ; the houses grow rarer, the 
shrines more ruinous and more aged, until one 
comes at last upon the bleak valley which intro- 
duces the final approach to Roncesvalles. 

169 



170 HILLS AND THE SEA 

The wealth and order everywhere associated 
with the Basque blood have wholly disappeared. 
This people is not receding — it holds its own, as 
it deserves to do ; but as there are new fields 
which it has occupied within the present century 
upon the more western hills, so there are others to 
the east, and this valley among them, from whence 
it has disappeared. The Basque names remain, 
but the people are no longer of the Basque type, 
and the tongue is forgotten. 

So gradual is the ascent and so continual the 
little cols which have to be surmounted, that a 
man does not notice how much upward he is 
being led towards the crest of the ridge. And 
when he comes at last upon the grove from which 
he sees the plateau of Roncesvalles spread before 
him, he wonders that the chain of the Pyrenees 
(which here lie out along in cliffs like sharp sun- 
ward walls, stretching in a strict perspective to the 
distant horizon) should seem so low. The reason 
that this white wall of cliffs seems so low is that 
the traveller is standing upon the last of a series 
of great steps which have led him up towards 
the frontier, much as the prairies lead one up 
towards the Rockies in Colorado. When he 
has passed through the very pleasant wood 
which lies directly beneath the cliffs, and reaches 
the little village of Roncesvalles itself, he won- 
ders still more that so famous a pass should 



RONCESVALLES 171 

be so small a thing. The pass from this side is 
so broad, with so low a saddle of grass, that it 
seems more like the crossing of the Sussex Downs 
than the crossing of an awful range of mountains. 
It is a rounded gap, up to which there lifts a pretty- 
little wooded combe; and no one could be certain, 
during the half-hour spent in climbing such a 
petty summit, that he was, in so climbing, con- 
quering Los Altos, the high Pyrenees. 

But when the summit is reached, then the mean- 
ing of the ^^ Imus PyrenceuSy^^ and the place that 
passage has taken in history, is comprehended in 
a moment. One sees at what a height one was in 
that plain of Roncesvalles, and one sees how the 
main range dominates the world ; for down below 
one an enormous cleft into the stuff of the moun- 
tains falls suddenly and almost sheer, and you see 
unexpectedly beneath you the approach from 
France into Spain. The gulf at its narrowest is 
tremendous ; but, more than that, when the floor of 
the valley is reached, that floor itself slopes away 
down and down by runs and by cascades towards 
the very distant plains of the north, upon which 
the funnel debouches. Moreover, it was up this 
gulf, and from the north, that the armies came ; 
it was this vision of a precipice that seized them 
when their leaders had determined to invade the 
Peninsula. This also was what, for so many 
generations, so many wanderers must have seen 



172 HILLS AND THE SEA 

who came to wonder at the place where the rear- 
guard of Charlemagne had been destroyed. 

The whole of the slope is covered with an 
ancient wood, and this wood is so steep that it 
would be impossible or dangerous to venture 
down it. The old Carolingian road skirts the 
mountain-side with difficulty, clinging well up 
upon its flank ; the great modern road, which is 
excellent and made for artillery, has to go even 
nearer the summit ; below them there falls away a 
slant or edge to which the huge beech trees cling 
almost parallel to the steep earth, running their 
perpendicular lines so high and close against the 
hill that they look like pines. As you peer down 
in among the trunks, you see the darkness in- 
creasing until the eye can penetrate no more, and 
dead, enormous trees that have lived their centu- 
ries, and have fallen perhaps for decades, lie 
across the aisles of the wood, propped up against 
their living fellows ; for, by one of those political 
accidents which are common throughout the whole 
length of the Pyrenees, both sides of the water- 
shed belong to Spain, so that no Government or 
modern energy has come to disturb the silence. 
One would swear that the last to order this wood 
were the Romans. 

I had thought to find so famous a valley peopled, 
or at least visited. I found it utterly alone, and 
even free from travellers, as though the wealthier 



RONCESVALLES 173 

part of Europe had forgotten the most famous of 
Christian epics. I saw no motor-cars, nor any 
women — only at last, in the very depths of the 
valley, a boy cutting grass in a tiny patch of open 
land. And it was hereabouts, so far as I could 
make out, that the Peers were killed. 

The song, of course, makes them fall on the far 
side of the summit, upon the fields of Roncesvalles, 
with the sun setting right at them along the hills. 
And that is as it should be, for it is evident that 
(in a poem) the hero fighting among hills should 
die upon the enemy's side of the hills. But that 
is not the place where Roland really died. The 
place where he really died, he and Oliver and 
Turpin and all the others, was here in the very 
recess of the Northern Valley. It was here only 
that rocks could have been rolled down upon an 
army, and here is that narrow, strangling gorge 
where the line of march could most easily have 
been cut in two by the fury of the mountaineers. 
Also Eginhard says very clearly that they had 
already passed the hills and seen France, and that 
is final. It was from these cliffs, then, that such 
an echo was made by the horn of Roland, and it 
was down that funnel of a valley that the noise 
grew until it filled Christendom ; and it was up 
that gorge that there came, as it says in the 

song — The host in a tide returning- : 

Charles the King and his Barony. 



174 HILLS AND THE SEA 

This was the place. And any man who may yet 
believe (I know such a discussion is pedantry) — 
any man who may yet believe the song of Roland 
to have been a Northern legend had better come to 
this place and drink the mountains in. For who- 
ever wrote — 

High are the hills and huge and dim with cloud, 
Down in the deeps, the living streams are loud, 

had certainly himself stood in the silence and 
majesty of this valley. 

It was already nearly dark when we two men 
had clambered down to that place, and up between 
the walls of the valley we had already seen the 
early stars. We pushed on to the French frontier 
in an eager appetite for cleanliness and human 
food. 

The last Spanish town is called Val Carlos, as it 
ought to be, considering that Charlemagne him- 
self had once come roaring by. When we reached 
it in the darkness we had completed a forced 
march of forty-two miles, going light, it is true, 
and carrying nothing each of us but a gourd of 
wine and a sack, but we were very tired. There, 
at the goal of our effort, one faint sign of govern- 
ment and of men at last appeared. It was in 
character with all the rest. One might not cross 
the frontier upon the road without a written leave. 
The written leave was given us, and in half an 
hour Spain was free. 



THE SLANT OFF THE LAND 



W 



E live a very little time. Before we have 
reached the middle of our time perhaps, 
but not long before, we discover the magnitude of 
our inheritance. Consider England. How many 
men, I should like to know, have discovered before 
thirty what treasures they may work in her air? 
She magnifies us inwards and outwards ; her fields 
can lead the mind down towards the subtle be- 
ginning of things ; the tiny iridescence of insects ; 
the play of light upon the facets of a blade of 
grass. Her skies can lead the mind up infinitely 
into regions where it seems to expand and fill, no 
matter what immensities. 

It was the wind off the land that made me think 
of all this possession in which I am to enjoy so 
short a usufruct. I sat in my boat holding that 
tiller of mine, which is not over firm, and is but a 
rough bar of iron. There was no breeze in the 
air, and the little deep vessel swung slightly to the 
breathing of the sea. Her great mainsail and 
her balloon-jib came over lazily as she swung, 
and filled themselves with the cheating semblance 

175 



176 HILLS AND THE SEA 

of a wind. The boom creaked in the goose-neck, 
and at every roll the slack of the mainsheet 
tautened with a kind of little thud which thrilled 
the deck behind me. I saw under the curve of 
my head-sail the long and hazy line, which is the 
only frontier of England; the plain that rather 
marries with than defies her peculiar seas. For 
it was in the Channel, and not ten miles from the 
coast-line of my own county, that these thoughts 
rose in me during the calm at the end of winter, 
and the boat was drifting down more swiftly than 
I knew upon the ebb of the outer tide. Far off 
to the south sunlight played upon the water, and 
was gone again. The great ships did not pass 
near me, and so I sat under a hazy sky restraining 
the slight vibration of the helm and waiting for 
the wind. 

In whatever place a man may be the spring will 
come to him. I have heard of men in prison who 
would note the day when its influence passed 
through the narrow window that was their only 
communion with their kind. It comes even to 
men in cities; men of the stupid political sort, 
who think in maps and whose interest is in the 
addition of numbers. Indeed, I have heard such 
men in London itself expressing pleasure when a 
south-west gale came up in April from over the 
pines of Hampshire and of Surrey and mixed the 
Atlantic with the air of the fields. To me this 



THE SLANT OFF THE LAND 177 

year the spring came suddenly, like a voice speak- 
ing, though a low one — the voice of a person 
subtle, remembered, little-known, and always de- 
sired. For a wind blew off the land. 

The surface of the sea northward between me 
and the coast of Sussex had been for so many 
hours elastic, smooth, and dull, that I had come to 
forget the indications of a change. But here and 
there, a long way off, little lines began to show, 
which were indeed broad spaces of ruffled water, 
seen edgeways from the low free-board of my 
boat. These joined and made a surface all the 
way out towards me, but a surface not yet revealed 
for what it was, nor showing the movement and 
life and grace of waves. For no light shone 
upon it, and it was not yet near enough to be dis- 
tinguished. It grew rapidly, but the haze and 
silence had put me into so dreamy a state that 
I had forgotten the ordinary anxiety and irritation 
of a calm, nor had I at the moment that eager 
expectancy of movement which should accompany 
the sight of that dark line upon the sea. 

Other things possessed me, the memory of 
home and of the Downs. There went before this 
breeze, as it were, attendant servants, outriders 
who brought with them the scent of those first 
flowers in the North Wood or beyond Cumber 
Corner, and the fragrance of our grass, the 
savour which the sheep know at least, however 

N 



178 HILLS AND THE SEA 

much the visitors to my dear home ignore it, A 
deeper sympathy even than that of the senses 
came with those messengers and brought me the 
beeches and the yew trees also, although I was 
so far out at sea, for the loneliness of this great 
water recalled the loneliness of the woods, and 
both those solitudes — the real and the imaginary 
— mixed in my mind together as they might in 
the mind of a sleeping man. 

Before this wind as it approached, the sky also 
cleared : not of clouds, for there were none, but 
of that impalpable and warm mist which seems to 
us, who know the south country and the Channel, 
to be so often part of the sky, and to shroud 
without obscuring the empty distances of our 
seas. There was a hard clear light to the north ; 
and even over the Downs, low as they were upon 
the horizon, there was a sharp belt of blue. I 
saw the sun strike the white walls of Lady New- 
burgh's Folly, and I saw, what had hitherto been 
all confused, the long line of the Arundel Woods 
contrasting with the plain. Then the boom went 
over to port, the jib filled, I felt the helm pulling 
steadily for the first time in so many hours, and 
the boat responded. The wind was on me ; and 
though it was from the north, that wind was 
warm, for it came from the sheltered hills. 

Then, indeed, I quite forgot those first few 
moments, which had so little to do with the art of 



THE SLANT OFF THE LAND 179 

sailing, and which were perhaps unworthy of the 
full life that goes with the governing of sails and 
rudders. For one thing, I was no' longer alone ; a 
man is never alone with the wind — and the boat 
made three. There was work to be done in press- 
ing against the tiller and in bringing her up to 
meet the seas, small though they were, for my boat 
was also small. Life came into everything ; the 
Channel leapt and (because the wind was across 
the tide) the little waves broke in small white tips: 
in their movement and my own, in the dance of the 
boat and the noise of the shrouds, in the curtsy of 
the long sprit that caught the ridges of foam and 
lifted them in spray, even in the free streaming of 
that loose untidy end of line which played in the 
air from the leech, as young things play from 
wantonness, in the rush of the water, just up to 
and sometimes through the lee scuppers, and in 
the humming tautness of the sheet, in everything 
about me there was exuberance and joy. The sun 
upon the twenty million faces of the waves made 
music rather than laughter, and the energy which 
this first warmth of the year had spread all over the 
Channel and shore, while it made life one, seemed 
also to make it innumerable. We were now not 
only three, the wind and my boat and I : we were 
all part (and masters for the moment) of a great 
throng. I knew them all by their names, which I 
had learnt a long time ago, and had sung of 



180 HILLS AND THE SEA 

them in the North Sea. I have often written them 
down. I will not be ashamed to repeat them here, 
for good things never grow old. There was the 
Wave that brings good tidings, and the Wave 
that breaks on the shore, and the Wave of the 
island, and the Wave that helps, and the Wave 
that lifts forrard, the kindly Wave and the youngest 
Wave, and Amathea the Wave with bright hair, all 
the waves that come up round Thetis in her train 
when she rises from the side of the old man, her 
father, where he sits on his throne in the depth of 
the sea; when she comes up cleaving the water 
and appears to her sons in the upper world. 

The Wight showed clear before me. I was 
certain with the tide of making the Horse Buoy and 
Spithead while it was yet afternoon, and before the 
plenitude of that light and movement should have 
left me. I settled down to so much and such 
exalted delight as to a settled task. I lit my pipe 
for a further companion (since it was good to add 
even to so many). I kept my right shoulder only 
against the tiller, for the pressure was now steady 
and sound. I felt the wind grow heavy and 
equable, and I caught over my shoulder the merry 
wake of this very honest moving home of mine as 
she breasted and hissed through the sea. 

Here, then, was the proper end of a long cruise. 
It was spring time, and the season for work on 
land. I had been told so by the heartening wind. 



THE SLANT OFF THE LAND 181 

And as I went still westward, remembering the 
duties of the land, the sails still held full, the 
sheets and the weather shrouds still stood taut 
and straining, and the little clatter of the broken 
water spoke along the lee rail. And so the ship 
sailed on. 

'Ej* 5' dvefios trpriaev fiiaov Icrlop, dfJi(f)l d^ KVfia 
Xrelp-j^ 'irop<pvp€oy fJLeydX' faxc, pribs ioicrrjs. 



THE CANIGOU 

A MAN might discuss with himself what it 
was that made certain great sights of the 
world famous, and what it is that keeps others 
hidden. This would be especially interesting in 
the case of mountains. For there is no doubt that 
there is a modern attraction in mountains which 
may not endure, but which is almost as intense in 
our generation as it was in that of our fathers. 
The emotion produced by great height and by the 
something unique and inspiring which distin- 
guishes a mountain from a hill has bitten deeply 
into the modern mind. Yet there are some of the 
most astounding visions of this sort in Europe 
which are, and will probably remain, unempha- 
sized for travellers. 

The vision of the Bernese Oberland when it 
breaks upon one from the crest of Jura has been 
impressed— upon English people, at least — in two 
fine passages : the one written by Ruskin, the 
other, if I remember right, in a book called 
A Cruise upon Wheels, The French have, I 
believe, no classical presentment of that view, nor 

182 



THE CANIGOU 183 

perhaps have the Germans. The line of the Alps 
as one sees it upon very clear days from the last of 
the Apennines — this, I think, has never been 
properly praised in any modern book — not even 
an Italian. The great red mountain-face which 
St. Bruno called **the desert" I do not remember 
to have read of anywhere nor to have heard 
described ; for it stands above an unfrequented 
valley, and the regular approach to the Chartreuse 
is from the other side. Yet it is something which 
remains as vivid to those few who have suddenly 
caught sight of it from a turn of the Old Lyons 
road as though they had seen it in a fantastic 
dream. That astonishing circle of cliffs which 
surrounds Bourg d'Oisans, though it has been 
written of now and then, has not, so to speak, 
taken root in people's imagination. 

Even in this country there are twenty great 
effects which, though they have, of course, suffered 
record, are still secure from general praise ; for 
instance, that awful trench which opens under 
your feet, as it were, up north and beyond Plyn- 
limmon. It is a valley as unexpected and as 
incredible in its steepness and complete isolation 
as any one may see in the drawings of the romantic 
generation of English water-colour, yet perhaps 
no one has drawn it ; there is certainly no familiar 
picture of it anywhere. 

When one comes to think of it, the reason of 



184 HILLS AND THE SEA 

such exceptions to fame as are these is usually that 
such and such an unknown but great sight lies off 
the few general roads of travel. It is a vulgar 
reason, but the true one. Unless men go to a 
mountain to climb because it is difficult to climb, 
or unless it often appears before them along one 
of their main journeys, it will remain quiet. 
Among such masses is the Canigou. 

Here is a mountain which may be compared to 
Etna. It is lower, indeed, in the proportion of 
nine to eleven ; but when great isolated heights 
of this sort are in question, such a difference 
hardly counts. It can be seen, as Etna can, from 
the sea, though it stands a good deal more inland ; 
it dominates, as Etna does, a very famous plain, 
but modern travel does nothing to bring it into the 
general consciousness of the world. If Spain 
were wealthy, or if the Spanish harbours naturally 
led to any place which all the rich desired to visit, 
the name of the Canigou would begin to grow. 
Where the railway skirts the sea from Narbonne to 
Barcelona, it is your permanent companion for a 
good hour in the express, and for any time you 
like in the ordinary trains. During at least three 
months in the year, its isolation is peculiarly re- 
lieved and marked by the snow, which lies above 
an even line all along its vast bulk. It is also one 
of those mountains in which one can recognize the 
curious regularity of the ** belts " which text-books 



THE CANIGOU 185 

talk of. There are great forests at the base of it, 
just above the hot Mediterranean plain ; the beech 
comes higher than the olive, the pines last of all ; 
after them the pastures and the rocks. In the end 
of February a man climbs up from a spring that is 
as southern as Africa to a winter that is as northern 
as the highlands of Scotland, and all the while he 
feels that he is climbing nothing confused or vague, 
but one individual peak which is the genius of the 
whole countryside. 

This countryside is the Roussillon, a lordship 
as united as the Cerdagne ; it speaks one language, 
shows one type of face, and is approached by but 
a small group of roads, and each road passes 
through a mountain gap. For centuries it went 
with Barcelona. It needed the Revolution to 
make it French, and it is full of Spanish memories 
to this day. 

For the Roussillon depends upon the Canigou 
just as the Bay of Syracuse depends upon Etna, 
or that of Naples upon Vesuvius, and its familiar 
presence has sunk into the patriotism of the Rous- 
sillon people, as those more famous mountains 
have into the art and legends of their neighbours. 
There are I know not how many monographs 
upon the Canigou, but not one has been translated, 
I would wager, into any foreign language. 

Yet it is the mountain which very many men 
who have hardly heard its name have been looking 



186 HILLS AND THE SEA 

for all their lives. It gives as good camping as is 
to be had in the whole of the Pyrenees. I believe 
there is fishing, and perhaps one can shoot. 
Properly speaking, there is no climbing in it ; at 
least, one can walk up it all the way if one chooses 
the right path, but there is everything else men 
look for when they escape from cities. It is so 
big that you would never learn it in any number 
of camps, and the change of its impressions is 
perpetual. From the summit the view has two 
interests — of colour and of the past. You have 
below you a plain like an inlaid work of chosen 
stones : the whole field is an arrangement of 
different culture and of bright rocks and sand ; 
and below you, also, in a curve, is all that coast 
which at the close of the Roman Empire was, per- 
haps, the wealthiest in Europe. In the extreme 
north a man might make out upon a clear day the 
bulk of Narbonne. Perpignan is close by ; the 
little rock harbour of Venus, Port Vendres, is to 
the south. From the plain below one, which has 
always been crammed with riches, sprang the chief 
influences of Southern Gaul. It was here that the 
family of Charlemagne took its origin, and it was 
perhaps from here that he saw, through the 
windows of a palace, that fleet of pirates which 
moved him to his sad prophecy. That plain, 
moreover, will re-arise ; it is still rich, and all the 
Catalan province of Spain below it, of which it is 



THE CANIGOU 187 

the highway and the approach, must increase in 
value before Europe from year to year. The vast 
development of the French African territory is re- 
acting upon that coast : all it needs is ^ central 
harbour, and if that harbour were formed it would 
do what Narbo did for the Romans at the end of 
their occupation— it would tap, much better than 
does Cette, the wealth of Gascony, perhaps, also, 
an Atlantic trade, and its exchanges towards Africa 
and the Levant. The Mediterranean, which is 
perpetually increasing in wealth and in importance 
to-day, would have a second Marseilles, and should 
such a port arise— then, when our ships and our 
travellers are familiar with it, the Canigou (if it 
cares for that sort of thing) will be as happy as the 
Matterhorn. For the present it is all alone. 



THE MAN AND HIS WOOD 

I KNEW a man once that was a territorial mag- 
nate and had an estate in the county of Berk- 
shire. I will not conceal his name. It was William 
Frederick Charles Hermann-Postlethwaite. 

On his estate was a large family mansion, sur- 
rounded by tasteful gardens of a charming old 
kind, and next outside these a great park, well 
timbered. But the thing I am going to talk 
about was a certain wood of which he was rightly 
very proud. It stood on the slope of a grass 
down, just above the valley, and beneath it was 
a clean white road, and a little way along that 
a town, part of which belonged to Mr. Hermann- 
Postlethwaite, part to a local solicitor and money- 
lender, several bits to a brewer in Reading, and a 
few houses to the inhabitants. The people in the 
town were also fond of the wood, and called it 
*'The Old Wood." It was not very large, but, as 
I have said before, it was very beautiful, and con- 
tained all manner of trees, but especially beeches, 
under which nothing will grow — as the poet puts 

it in Sussex : Unner t' beech and t' yow 
Nowt '11 grow. 
i88 



THE MAN AND HIS WOOD 189 

Well, as years passed, Mr. Herman n-Postle- 
thwaite became fonder and fonder of the wood. 
He began towards 1885 to think it the nicest thing 
on his estate — which it was ; and he would often 
ride out to look at it of a morning on his grey- 
mare '* Betsy." When he rode out like this of a 
morning his mount was well groomed, and so was 
he, however early it might be, and he would carry 
a little cane to hit the mare with and also as a 
symbol of authority. The people who met him 
would touch their foreheads, and he would wave 
his hand genially in reply. He was a good fellow. 
But the principal thing about him was his care for 
the old wood ; and when he rode out to look at 
it, as I say, he would speak to any one around so 
early — his bailiff, as might be, or sometimes his 
agent, or even the foreman of the workshop or the 
carpenter, or any hedger or ditcher that might be 
there, and point out bits of the wood, and say, 
*'That branch looks pretty dicky. No harm to 
cut that off short and parcel and serve the end and 
cap it with a zinc cap"; or, '* Better be cutting the 
Yartle Bush for the next fallow, it chokes the 
gammon-rings, and I don't like to see so much 
standard ivy about, it's the death of trees." I am 
not sure that I have got the technical words right, 
but at any rate they were more or less like that, 
for I have heard him myself time and again. 
I often used to go out with him on another 



190 HILLS AND THE SEA 

horse, called Sultan, which he lent me to ride 
upon. 

Well, he got fonder and fonder of this wood, 
and kept on asking people what he should do, and 
how one could make most use of it, and he wor- 
ried a good deal about it. He read books about 
woods, and in the opening of 1891 he had down to 
stay with him for a few days a man called Churt, 
who had made a great success with woods on the 
Warra-Warra. But Churt was a vulgar fellow, 
and so Hermann - Postlethwaite's wife. Lady 
Gwynnys Hermann-Postlethwaite, would not have 
him in the house again, which was a bother. Her 
husband then rode over to see another man, and 
the upshot of it was that he put up a great board 
saying ** Trespassers in this wood will be prose- 
cuted," and it might as well not have been put up, 
for no one ever went into the wood, not even from 
the little town, because it was too far for them to 
walk, and, anyhow, they did not care for walking. 
And as for the doctor's son, a boy of thirteen, who 
went in there with an air-gun to shoot things, he 
paid no attention to the board. 

The next thing my friend did was to have a fine 
strong paling put all round the wood in March, 
1894. This paling was of oak ; it was seven feet 
high ; it had iron spikes along the top. There 
were six gates in it, and stout posts at intervals of 
ten yards. The boards overlapped very exactly. 



THE MAN AND HIS WOOD 191 

It was as good a bit of work as ever I saw. He 
had it varnished, and it looked splendid. All this 
took two years. 

Just then he was elected to Parliament, not for 
Berkshire, as you might have imagined, but for a 
slum division of Birmingham. He was very 
proud of this, and quite rightly too. He said : 
** I am the only Conservative member in the Mid- 
lands." It almost made him forget about his 
wood. He shut up the Berkshire place and took a 
house in town, and as he could not afford Mayfair, 
and did not understand such things very well, the 
house he took was an enormous empty house in 
Bayswater, and he had no peace until he gave it 
up for a set of rooms off Piccadilly ; and then his 
mother thought that looked so odd that he did the 
right thing, and got into a nice old-fashioned fur- 
nished house in Westminster, overlooking the 
Green Park. 

But all this cost him a mint of money, and 
politics made him angrier and angrier. They 
never let him speak, and they made him vote for 
things he thought perfectly detestable. Then he 
did speak, and as he was an honest English gentle- 
man the papers called him ridiculous names and 
said he had no brains. So he just jolly well 
threw the whole thing up and went back to Berk- 
shire, and everybody welcomed him, and he did a 
thing he had never done before : he put a flag up 



192 HILLS AND THE SEA 

over his house to show he was at home. Then he 
began to think of his wood again. 

The very first time he rode out to look at it he 
found the paling had given way in places from 
the fall of trees, and that some leaned inwards 
and some outwards, and that one of the gates was 
off its hinges. There were also two cows walking 
about in the wood, and what annoyed him most of 
all, the iron spikes were rusty and the varnish had 
all gone rotten and white and streaky on the 
palings. He spoke to the bailiff about this, and 
hauled him out to look at it. The bailiff rubbed 
the varnish with his finger, smelt it, and said that 
it had perished. He also said that there was no 
such thing as good varnish nowadays, and he 
added that there wasn't any varnish, not the very 
best, but wouldn't go like that with rain and all, 
Mr. Hermann -Postlethwaite grumbled a good 
deal, but he supposed the bailiff knew best ; so he 
told him to see what could be done, and for several 
weeks he heard no more about it. 

I forgot to tell you that about this time the 
South African War had broken out, and as things 
were getting pretty tangled, Hermann-Postle- 
thwaite went out with his regiment, the eighth 
battalion, not of the Berkshire, but of the Orkney 
regiment. While he was out there, his brother, 
in Dr. Charlbury's home, died, and he succeeded 
to the baronetcy. As he already had a V.C. and 



THE MAN AND HIS WOOD 193 

was now given a D.S.O., as well as being one of 
the people mentioned in dispatches, he was pretty 
important by the time he came home, when the 
war was over, just before the elections of 1900. 

When he got home he had a splendid welcome, 
both from his tenants in Berkshire in passing 
through and from those of his late brother in the 
big place in Worcestershire. He preferred his 
Berkshire place, however, and, letting the big 
place to an American of the name of Hendrik K. 
Boulge, he went back to his first home. When 
he got there he thought of the old wood, and went 
out to look at it. The palings were mended, but 
they were covered all over with tar ! He was ex- 
ceedingly angry, and ordered them to be painted 
at once ; but the bailiff assured him one could 
not paint over tar, and so did the carpenter and 
the foreman. At this he had a fit of rage, and 
ordered the whole damned thing to be pulled 
down, and swore he would be damned if he ever 
had a damned stick or a rail round the damned 
wood again. He was no longer young ; he was 
getting stout and rather puffy; he was not so 
reasonable as of old. Anyhow, he had the whole 
thing pulled down. Next year (that is, in 1901) his 
wife died. 

I wish I had the space to tell you all the other 

things he did to the wood. How a friend of his 

having sold a similar wood on the Thames in 
o 



194 HILLS AND THE SEA 

building lots at ;f 500 an acre, he put up the old 
wood at the same rate. How, the old wood being 
200 acres in extent, he hoped to make ;£"ioo,ooo 
out of it. How he thought this a tidy sum. How 
he got no offers at this price, nor at ;£"ioo, nor at 
;^5o. How an artist offered him ;£"20 for half an 
acre to put up a red tin bungalow upon. How he 
lost his temper with the artist. How at last he 
left the whole thing alone and tried to forget all 
about it. 

The old wood to-day is just like what it was when 
I wandered in it as a boy. The doctor's son is a 
man now, and is keeping a bar in Sydney ; so he 
is gone. The townspeople don't come any more 
than before. I am the only person who goes near 
the place. The trees are a trifle grander. I happen 
now and then, when I visit this Berkshire parish, 
upon a stump of a post or an old spike in the grass 
of this wood, but otherwise it is as though all this 
had not been. 

A solemn thought : How enduring are the works 
of Nature — how perishable those of Man ! 



THE CHANNEL 

FRIENDS of mine, friends all, and you also, 
publishers, colonials and critics, do you 
know that particular experience for which I am 
trying to find words? Do you know that glamour 
in the mind which arises and transforms our 
thought when we see the things that the men who 
made us saw— the things of a long time ago, the 
origins? I think everybody knows that glamour, 
but very few people know where to find it. 

Every man knows that he has in him the power 
for such revelations, and every man wonders in 
what strange place he may come upon them. 
There are men also (very rich) who have considered 
all the world and wandered over it, seeking those 
first experiences and trying to feel as felt the 
earlier men in a happier time — yet these few rich 
men have not so felt and have not so found the 
things which they desire. I have known men who 
have thought to find them in the mountains, but 
would not climb them simply enough and refused 
to leave their luxuries behind, and so lost every- 
thing, and might as well have been walking in a 

195 



196 HILLS AND THE SEA 

dirty town at home for all the little good that the 
mountains did to them. And I know men who 
have thought to find this memory and desire in 
foreign countries, in Africa, hunting great beasts 
such as our fathers hunted ; yet even these have 
not relit those old embers, which if they lie dead 
and dark in a man make his whole soul dusty and 
useless, but which if they be once rekindled can 
make him part of all the centuries. 

Yet there is a simple and an easy way to find 
what the men who made us found, and to see the 
world as they saw it, and to take a bath, as it were, 
in the freshness of beginnings ; and that is to go 
to work as cheaply and as hardly as you can, and 
only as much away from men as they were away 
from men, and not to read or to write or to think, 
but to eat and drink and use the body in many 
immediate ways, which are at the feet of every man. 
Every man who will walk for some days carelessly, 
sleeping rough when he must, or in poor inns, and 
making for some one place direct because he desires 
to see it, will know the thing I mean. And there 
is a better way still of which I shall now speak : I 
mean, to try the seas in a little boat not more than 
twenty- five feet long, preferably decked, of 
shallow draught, such as can enter into all creeks 
and havens, and so simply rigged that by oneself, 
or with a friend at most, one can wander all over 
the world. 



THE CHANNEL 197 

Certainly every man that goes to sea in a little 
boat of this kind learns terror and salvation, 
happy living, air, danger, exultation, glory and 
repose at the end ; and they are not words to him, 
but, on the contrary, realities which will after- 
wards throughout his life give the mere words 
a full meaning. And for this experiment there 
lies at our feet, I say, the Channel. 

It is the most marvellous sea in the world — the 
most suited for these little adventures ; it is 
crammed with strange towns, differing one from 
the other ; it has two opposite people upon either 
side, and hills and varying climates, and the 
hundred shapes and colours of the earth, here 
rocks, there sand, there cliffs, and there marshy 
shores. It is a little world. And what is more, it 
is a kind of inland sea. 

People will not understand how narrow it is, 
crossing it hurriedly in great steamships ; nor will 
they make it a home for pleasure unless they are 
rich and can have great boats ; yet they should, 
for on its water lies the best stage for playing out 
the old drama by which the soul of a healthy man 
is kept alive. For instance, listen to this story : — 

The sea being calm, and the wind hot, uncertain, 
and light from the east, leaving oily gaps on the 
water, and continually dying down, I drifted one 
morning in the strong ebb to the South Goodwin 
Lightship, wondering what to do. There was 



198 HILLS AND THE SEA 

a haze over the land and over the sea, and through 
the haze great ships a long way off showed, one 
or two of them, like oblong targets which one fires 
at with guns. They hardly moved in spite of all 
their canvas set, there was so little breeze. So 
I drifted in the slow ebb past the South Goodwin, 
and I thought: '^What is all this drifting and 
doing nothing? Let us play the fool, and see if 
there are no adventures left." 

So I put my little boat about until the wind took 
her from forward, such as it was, and she crawled 
out to sea. 

It was a dull, uneasy morning, hot and silent, 
and the wind, I say, was hardly a wind, and most 
of the time the sails flapped uselessly. 

But after eleven o^clock the wind first rose, and 
then shifted a little, and then blew light but steady ; 
and then at last she heeled and the water spoke 
under her bows, and still she heeled and ran, until 
in the haze I could see no more land; but ever so 
far out there were no seas, for the light full breeze 
was with the tide, the tide ebbing out as a strong, 
and silent as a man in anger, down the hidden 
parallel valleys of the narrow sea. And I held this 
little wind till about two o'clock, when I drank wine 
and ate bread and meat at the tiller, for I had 
them by me, and just afterwards, still through a 
thick haze of heat, I saw Griz-nez, a huge ghost, 
right up against and above me ; and I wondered, 



THE CHANNEL 199 

for I had crossed the Channel, now for the first 
time, and knew now what it felt like to see new 
land. 

Though I knew nothing of the place, I had this 
much sense, that I said to myself: *^The tide is 
right down Channel, racing through the hidden 
valleys under the narrow sea, so it will all go down 
together and all come up together, and the flood 
will come on this foreign side much at the same 
hour that it does on the home side." My boat lay 
to the east and the ebb tide held her down, and I 
lit a pipe and looked at the French hills and 
thought about them and the people in them, and 
England which I had left behind, and I was de- 
lighted with the loneliness of the sea; and still I 
waited for the flood. 

But in a little while the chain made a rattling 
noise, and she lay quite slack and swung oddly; 
and then there were little boiling and eddying 
places in the water, and the water seemed to come 
up from underneath sometimes, and altogether it 
behaved very strangely, and this was the turn of 
the tide. Then the wind dropped also, and for a 
moment she lollopped about, till at last, after I 
had gone below and straightened things, I came 
on deck to see that she had turned completely 
round, and that the tide at last was making up 
my way, towards Calais, and her chain was taut 
and her nose pointed down Channel, and a little 



200 HILLS AND THE SEA 

westerly breeze, a little draught of air, came up 
cool along the tide. 

When this came I was very glad, for I saw that 
I could end my adventure before night. So I 
pulled up the anchor and fished it, and then turned 
with the tide under me, and the slight half-felt 
breeze just barely filling the mainsail (the sheet was 
slack, so powerless was the wind), and I ran up 
along that high coast, watching eagerly every new 
thing ; but I kept some way out for fear of shoals, till 
after three good hours under the reclining sun of 
afternoon, which glorified the mist, I saw, far off, 
the roofs and spires of a town, and a low pier 
running well out to sea, and I knew that it must 
be Calais. And I ran for these piers, careless of 
how I went, for it was already half of the spring 
flood tide, and everything was surely well covered 
for so small a boat, and I ran up the fairway in 
between the piers, and saw Frenchmen walking 
about and a great gun peeping up over its earth- 
work, and plenty of clean new masonry. And 
a man came along and showed me where I could 
lie ; but I was so strange to the place that I would 
not take a berth, but lay that night moored to an 
English ship. 

And when I had eaten and drunk and everything 
was stowed away and darkness had fallen, I went 
on deck, and for a long time sat silent, smoking 
a pipe and watching the enormous lighthouse of 



THE CHANNEL 201 

Calais, which is built right in the town, and 
which turns round and round above one all night 
long. 

And I thought : ** Here is a wonderful thing I I 
have crossed the Channel in this little boat, and 
I know now what the sea means that separates 
France from England. I have strained my eyes 
for shore through a haze. I have seen new lands, 
and I feel as men do who have dreamt dreams." 

But in reality I had had very great luck indeed, 
and had had no right to cross, for my coming 
back was to be far more difficult and dreadful, 
and I was to suffer many things before again I 
could see tall England, close by me, out of the 
sea. 

But how I came back, and of the storm, and of 
its majesty, and of how the boat and I survived, 
I will tell you another time, only imploring you to 
do the same ; not to tell of it, I mean, but to sail 
it in a little boat. 



THE MOWING OF A FIELD 

THERE is a valley in South England remote 
from ambition and from fear, where the 
passage of strangers is rare and unperceived, and 
where the scent of the grass in summer is breathed 
only by those who are native to that unvisited land. 
The roads to the Channel do not traverse it ; they 
choose upon either side easier passes over the 
range. One track alone leads up through it to the 
hills, and this is changeable : now green where 
men have little occasion to go, now a good road 
where it nears the homesteads and the barns. The 
woods grow steep above the slopes ; they reach 
sometimes the very summit of the heights, or, 
when they cannot attain them, fill in and clothe the 
combes. And, in between, along the floor of the 
valley, deep pastures and their silence are bordered 
by lawns of chalky grass and the small yew trees 
of the Downs. 

The clouds that visit its sky reveal themselves 
beyond the one great rise, and sail, white and 
enormous, to the other, and sink beyond that 
other. But the plains above which they have 

202 



THE MOWING OF A FIELD 203 

travelled and the Weald to which they go, the 
people of the valley cannot see and hardly recall. 
The wind, when it reaches such fields, is no longer 
a gale from the salt, but fruitful and soft, an inland 
breeze ; and those whose blood was nourished here 
feel in that wind the fruitfulness of our orchards 
and all the life that all things draw from the air. 

In this place, when I was a boy, I pushed 
through a fringe of beeches that made a complete 
screen between me and the world, and I came to a 
glade called No Man's Land. I climbed beyond 
it, and I was surprised and glad, because from 
the ridge of that glade I saw the sea. To this 
place very lately I returned. 

The many things that I recovered as I came up the 
countryside were not less charming than when a 
distant memory had enshrined them, but much 
more. Whatever veil is thrown by a longing 
recollection had not intensified nor even made 
more mysterious the beauty of that happy ground ; 
not in my very dreams of morning had I, in exile, 
seen it more beloved or more rare. Much also that 
I had forgotten now returned to me as I approached 
— a group of elms, a little turn of the parson's wall, 
a small paddock beyond the graveyard close, 
cherished by one man, with a low wall of very old 
stone guarding it all around. And all these things 
fulfilled and amplified my delight, till even the 
good vision of the place, which I had kept so many 



204 HILLS AND THE SEA 

years, left me and was replaced by its better reality. 
**Here," I said to myself, ^*is a symbol of what 
some say is reserved for the soul : pleasure of a 
kind which cannot be imagined save in the moment 
when at last it is attained." 

When I came to my own gate and my own 
field, and had before me the house I knew, I 
looked around a little (though it was already 
evening), and I saw that the grass was standing 
as it should stand when it is ready for the scythe. 
For in this, as in everything that a man can 
do — of those things at least which are very old — 
there is an exact moment when they are done 
best. And it has been remarked of whatever rules 
us that it works blunderingly, seeing that the good 
things given to man are not given at the precise 
moment when they would have filled him with 
delight. But, whether this be true or false, we 
can choose the just turn of the seasons in every- 
thing we do of our own will, and especially in the 
making of hay. Many think that hay is best made 
when the grass is thickest ; and so they delay until 
it is rank and in flower, and has already heavily 
pulled the ground. And there is another false 
reason for delay, which is wet weather. For very 
few will understand (though it comes year after 
year) that we have rain always in South England 
between the sickle and the scythe, or say just after 
the weeks of east wind are over. First we have a 



THE MOWING OF A FIELD 205 

week of sudden warmth, as though the South had 
come to see us all ; then we have the weeks of 
east and south-east wind ; and then we have more 
or less of that rain of which I spoke, and which 
always astonishes the world. Now it is just before, 
or during, or at the very end of that rain — but not 
later — that grass should be cut for hay. True, 
upland grass, which is always thin, should be cut 
earlier than the grass in the bottoms and along the 
water meadows ; but not even the latest, even in 
the wettest seasons, should be left (as it is) to 
flower and even to seed. For what we get when 
we store our grass is not a harvest of something 
ripe, but a thing just caught in its prime before 
maturity : as witness that our corn and straw are 
best yellow, but our hay is best green. So also 
Death should be represented with a scythe and 
Time with a sickle ; for Time can take only what 
is ripe, but Death comes always too soon. In a 
word, then, it is always much easier to cut grass 
too late than too early ; and I, under that evening 
and come back to these pleasant fields, looked at 
the grass and knew that it was time. June was in 
full advance : it was the beginning of that season 
when the night has already lost her foothold of 
the earth and hovers over it, never quite descend- 
ing, but mixing sunset with the dawn. 

Next morning, before it was yet broad day, I 
awoke, and thought of the mowing. The birds 



206 HILLS AND THE SEA 

were already chattering in the trees beside my 
window, all except the nightingale, which had left 
and flown away to the Weald, where he sings all 
summer by day as well as by night in the oaks and 
the hazel spinneys, and especially along the little 
river Adur, one of the rivers of the Weald. The 
birds and the thought of the mowing had awakened 
me, and I went down the stairs and along the stone 
floors to where I could find a scythe ; and when I 
took it from its nail, I remembered how, fourteen 
years ago, I had last gone out with my scythe, 
just so, into the fields at morning. In between 
that day and this were many things, cities and 
armies, and a confusion of books, mountains and 
the desert, and horrible great breadths of sea. 

When I got out into the long grass the sun was 
not yet risen, but there were already many colours 
in the eastern sky, and I made haste to sharpen 
my scythe, so that I might get to the cutting 
before the dew should dry. Some say that it is 
best to wait till all the dew has risen, so as to get 
the grass quite dry from the very first. But, 
though it is an advantage to get the grass quite 
dry, yet it is not worth while to wait till the dew 
has risen. For, in the first place, you lose many 
hours of work (and those the coolest), and next — 
which is more important — you lose that great ease 
and thickness in cutting which comes of the dew. 
So I at once began to sharpen my scythe. 



THE MOWING OF A FIELD 207 

There is an art also in the sharpening of a 
scythe, and it is worth describing carefully. Your 
blade must be dry, and that is why you will see 
men rubbing the scythe-blade with grass before 
they whet it. Then also your rubber must be 
quite dry, and on this account it is a good thing to 
lay it on your coat and keep it there during all 
your day's mowing. The scythe you stand up^ 
right, with the blade pointing away from you, and 
you put your left hand firmly on the back of the 
blade, grasping it : then you pass the rubber first 
down one side of the blade-edge and then down 
the other, beginning near the handle and going on 
to the point and working quickly and hard. 
When you first do this you will^ perhaps, cut 
your hand ; but it is only at first that such an 
accident will happen to you. 

To tell when the scythe is sharp enough this is 
the rule. First the stone clangs and grinds 
against the iron harshly ; then it rings musically 
to one note ; then, at last, it purrs as though the 
iron and stone were exactly suited. When you 
hear this, your scythe is sharp enough ; and I, 
when I heard it in that June dawn, with every- 
thing quite silent except the birds, let down the 
scythe and bent myself to mow. 

When one does anything anew, after so many 
years, one fears very much for one's trick or habit. 
But all things once learnt are easily recoverable, 



208 HILLS AND THE SEA 

and I very soon recovered the swing and power of 
the mower. Mowing well and mowing badly — or 
rather not mowing at all — are separated by very 
little ; as is also true of writing verse, of playing 
the fiddle, and of dozens of other things, but of 
nothing more than of believing. For the bad or 
young or untaught mower without tradition, the 
mower Promethean, the mower original and con- 
temptuous of the past, does all these things : He 
leaves great crescents of grass uncut. He digs 
the point of the scythe hard into the ground with 
a jerk. He loosens the handles and even the 
fastening of the blade. He twists the blade with 
his blunders, he blunts the blade, he chips it, 
dulls it, or breaks it clean off at the tip. If any 
one is standing by he cuts him in the ankle. He 
sweeps up into the air wildly, with nothing to 
resist his stroke. He drags up earth with the 
grass, which is like making the meadow bleed. 
But the good mower who does things just as they 
should be done and have been for a hundred 
thousand years, falls into none of these fooleries. 
He goes forward very steadily, his scythe-blade 
just barely missing the ground, every grass 
falling ; the swish and rhythm of his mowing are 
always the same. 

So great an art can only be learnt by continual 
practice ; but this much is worth writing down, 
that, as in all good work, to know the thing with 



THE MOWING OF A FIELD 209 

which you work is the core of the affair. Good 
verse is best written on good paper with an easy 
pen, not with a lump of coal on a whitewashed 
wall. The pen thinks for you ; and so does the 
scythe mow for you if you treat it honourably and 
in a manner that makes it recognize its service. 
The manner is this. You must regard the scythe 
as a pendulum that swings, not as a knife that 
cuts. A good mower puts no more strength into 
his stroke than into his lifting. Again, stand up 
to your work. The bad mower, eager and full of 
pain, leans forward and tries to force the scythe 
through the grass. The good mower, serene and 
able, stands as nearly straight as the shape of the 
scythe will let him, and follows up every stroke 
closely, moving his left foot forward. Then also 
let every stroke get well away. Mowing is a thing 
of ample gestures, like drawing a cartoon. Then, 
again, get yourself into a mechanical and repeti- 
tive mood : be thinking of anything at all but 
your mowing, and be anxious only when there 
seems some ii^terruption to the monotony of the 
sound. In this mowing should be like one's 
prayers — all of a sort and always the same, and so 
made that you can establish a monotony and work 
them, as it were, with half your mind : that hap- 
pier half, the half that does not bother. 

In this way, when I had recovered the art after 
so many years, I went forward over the field, cut- 
p 



210 HILLS AND THE SEA 

ting lane after lane through the grass, and bring- 
ing out its most secret essences with the sweep of 
the scythe until the air was full of odours. At the 
end of every lane I sharpened my scythe and 
looked back at the work done, and then carried 
my scythe down again upon my shoulder to begin 
another. So, long before the bell rang in the 
chapel above me — that is, long before six o'clock, 
which is the time for the Angelus — I had many 
swathes already lying in order parallel like sol- 
diery ; and the high grass yet standing, making 
a great contrast with the shaven part, looked dense 
and high. As it says in the Ballad of Val-eS" 
DuneSy where — 

The tall son of the Seven Winds 
Came riding- out of Hither-hythe, 

and his horse-hoofs (you will remember) trampled 
into the press and made a gap in it, and his sword 
(as you know) 

. . . was like a scythe 
In Arcus when the grass is high 
And all the swathes in order lie, 
And there's the bailiff standing by 

A-gathering of the tithe. 

So I mowed all that morning, till the houses 
awoke in the valley, and from some of them rose a 
little fragrant smoke, and men began to be seen. 

I stood still and rested on my scythe to watch 
the awakening of the village, when I saw coming 



THE MOWING OF A FIELD 211 

up to my field a man whom I had known in older 
times, before I had left the Valley. 

He was of that dark silent race upon which all 
the learned quarrel, but which, by whatever mean- 
ingless name it may be called — Iberian, or Celtic, 
or what you will — is the permanent root of all 
England, and makes England wealthy and pre- 
serves it everywhere, except perhaps in the Fens 
and in a part of Yorkshire. Everywhere else you 
will find it active and strong. These people are 
intensive ; their thoughts and their labours turn 
inward. It is on account of their presence in these 
islands that our gardens are the richest in the 
world. They also love low rooms and ample fires 
and great warm slopes of thatch. They have, as I 
believe, an older acquaintance with the English 
air than any other of all the strains that make up 
England. They hunted in the Weald with stones, 
and camped in the pines of the green-sand. They 
lurked under the oaks of the upper rivers, and saw 
the legionaries go up, up the straight paved road 
from the sea. They helped the few pirates to 
destroy the towns, and mixed with those pirates 
and shared the spoils of the Roman villas, and 
were glad to see the captains and the priests 
destroyed. They remain ; and no admixture of 
the Frisian pirates, or the Breton, or the Angevin 
and Norman conquerors, has very much affected 
their cunning eyes. 



212 HILLS AND THE SEA 

To this race, I say, belonged the man who now 
approached me. And he said to me, *' Mowing?" 
And I answered, ** Ar." Then he also said '^ Ar," 
as in duty bound ; for so we speak to each other in 
the Stenes of the Downs. 

Next he told me that, as he had nothing to do, 
he would lend me a hand ; and I thanked him 
warmly, or, as we say, ** kindly." For it is a 
good custom of ours always to treat bargaining as 
though it were a courteous pastime ; and though 
what he was after was money, and what I wanted 
was his labour at the least pay, yet we both played 
the comedy that we were free men, the one grant- 
ing a grace and the other accepting it. For the 
dry bones of commerce, avarice and method and 
need, are odious to the Valley ; and we cover 
them up with a pretty body of fiction and observ- 
ances. Thus, when it comes to buying pigs, the 
buyer does not begin to decry the pig and the 
vendor to praise it, as is the custom with lesser 
men ; but tradition makes them do business in 
this fashion : — 

First the buyer will go up to the seller when he 
sees him in his own steading, and, looking at the 
pig with admiration, the buyer will say that rain 
may or may not fall, or that we shall have snow 
or thunder, according to the time of year. Then 
the seller, looking critically at the pig, will agree 
that the weather is as his friend maintains. There 



THE MOWING OF A FIELD 213 

is no haste at all ; great leisure marks the dignity 
of their exchange. And the next step is, that the 
buyer says: ^* That's a fine pig you have there, 
Mr. " (giving the seller's name). *' Ar, power- 
ful fine pig." Then the seller, saying also '' Mr." 
(for twin brothers rocked in one cradle give each 
other ceremonious observance here), the seller, 
I say, admits, as though with reluctance, the 
strength and beauty of the pig, and falls into deep 
thought. Then the buyer says, as though moved 
by a great desire, that he is ready to give so much 
for the pig, naming half the proper price, or a 
little less. Then the seller remains in silence for 
some moments ; and at last begins to shake his 
head slowly, till he says: ^*I don't be thinking 
of selling the pig, anyways." He will also add 
that a party only Wednesday offered him so 
much for the pig — and he names about double the 
proper price. Thus all ritual is duly accom- 
plished ; and the solemn act is entered upon with 
reverence and in a spirit of truth. For when the 
buyer uses this phrase : *^ I'll tell you what I will 
do," and offers within half a crown of the pig's 
value, the seller replies that he can refuse him 
nothing, and names half a crown above its value ; 
the difference is split, the pig is sold, and in the 
quiet soul of each runs the peace of something 
accomplished. 

Thus do we buy a pig or land or labour or malt 



214 HILLS AND THE SEA 

or lime, always with elaboration and set forms ; 
and many a London man has paid double and 
more for his violence and his greedy haste and 
very unchivalrous higgling. As happened with 
the land at Underwaltham, which the mortgagees 
had begged and implored the estate to take at 
twelve hundred, and had privately offered to all 
the world at a thousand, but which a sharp direct 
man, of the kind that makes great fortunes, a 
man in a motor-car, a man in a fur coat, a man of 
few words, bought for two thousand three hundred 
before my very eyes, protesting that they might 
take his offer or leave it ; and all because he did 
not begin by praising the land. 

Well then, this man I spoke of offered to help 
me, and he went to get his scythe. But I went 
into the house and brought out a gallon jar of 
small ale for him and for me ; for the sun was now 
very warm, and small ale goes well with mowing. 
When we had drunk some of this ale in mugs 
called **I see you," we took each a swathe, he 
a little behind me because he was the better 
mower ; and so for many hours we swung, one 
before the other, mowing and mowing at the tall 
grass of the field. And the sun rose to noon and 
we were still at our mowing ; and we ate food, but 
only for a little while, and we took again to our 
mowing. And at last there was nothing left but 
a small square of grass, standing like a square of 



THE MOWING OF A FIELD 215 

linesmen who keep their formation, tall and un- 
broken, with all the dead lying around them when 
a battle is over and done. 

Then for some little time I rested after all those 
hours ; and the man and I talked together, and 
a long way off we heard in another field the 
musical sharpening of a scythe. 

The sunlight slanted powdered and mellow over 
the breadth of the valley ; for day was nearing its 
end. I went to fetch rakes from the steading ; 
and when I had come back the last of the grass 
had fallen, and all the field lay flat and smooth, 
with the very green short grass in lanes between 
the dead and yellow swathes. 

These swathes we raked into cocks to keep them 
from the dew against our return at daybreak ; and 
we made the cocks as tall and steep as we could, 
for in that shape they best keep off the dew, and 
it is easier also to spread them after the sun has 
risen. Then we raked up every straggling blade, 
till the whole field was a clean floor for the tedding 
and the carrying of the hay next morning. The 
grass we had mown was but a little over two 
acres ; for that is all the pasture on my little tiny 
farm. 

When we had done all this, there fell upon us 
the beneficent and deliberate evening ; so that as 
we sat a little while together near the rakes, we 
saw the valley more solemn and dim around us, 



216 HILLS AND THE SEA 

and all the trees and hedgerows quite still, and 
held by a complete silence. Then I paid my com- 
panion his wage, and bade him a good night, till 
we should meet in the same place before sunrise. 

He went off with a slow and steady progress, as 
all our peasants do, making their walking a part 
of the easy but continual labour of their lives. 
But I sat on, watching the light creep around 
towards the north and change, and the waning 
moon coming up as though by stealth behind the 
woods of No Man's Land. 



THE ROMAN ROAD 

THE other day (it was Wednesday, and the 
air was very pure) I went into the stable 
upon my way towards the wood, and there I saw 
my horse Monster standing by himself, regarding 
nothingness. And when I had considered what 
a shame it was to take one's pleasure in a wood 
and leave one's helpless horse at home, I bridled 
him and saddled him and took him out, and rode 
him the way that I had meant to go alone. So 
we went together along the Stene under the North 
Wood until we got to the edge of the forest, and 
then we took the green Ride to the right, for it 
was my intention to go and look at the Roman 
road. 

Behind my house, behind my little farm, there 
are as many miles of turf as one cares to count, 
and then behind it also, but the other way, there 
goes this deep and lonely forest. It is principally 
of beech, which is the tree of the chalk, and no 
one has cut it or fenced it or thought about it 
(except to love it), since the parts about my 
village took their names : Gumber and Fairmile 

217 



218 HILLS AND THE SEA 

Bay Combe, the Nore, and the stretch called No 
Man's Land. 

Into the darkness of these trees I rode very 
quietly with Monster, my horse, but whether the 
autumn air were pleasanterto him or to me neither 
of us could decide, for there is no bridge between 
two souls. That is, if horses have a soul, which 
I suppose they have, for they are both stupid and 
kindly, and they fear death as though a part, and 
but a part, of them were immortal. Also they see 
things in the dark and are cognizant of evil. 

When I had gone some hundred yards towards 
the Roman road I saw, bending lower than the 
rest on the tree from which it hung, a golden 
bough, and I said to myself that I had had good 
luck, for such a thing has always been the sign of 
an unusual experience and of a voyage among the 
dead. All the other leaves of the tree were green, 
but the turn of the year, which sends out forageris 
just as the spring does, marking the way it is to 
go, had come and touched this bough and changed 
it, so that it shone out by itself in the recesses of 
the forest and gleamed before and behind. I did 
not ask what way it led me, for I knew ; and so I 
went onwards, riding my horse, until I came to 
that long bank of earth which runs like a sort of 
challenge through this ancient land to prove what 
our origins were, and who first brought us merry 
people into the circuit of the world. 



THE ROMAN ROAD 219 

When I saw the Roman road the sharper 
influence which it had had upon my boyhood 
returned to me, and I got off my horse and took 
his bit out of his mouth so that he could play the 
fool with the grass and leaves (which are bad for 
him), and I hitched the snaffle to a little broken 
peg of bough so that he could not wander. And 
then I looked up and down along the boles of the 
great North Wood, taking in the straight line of 
the way. 

I have heard it said that certain professors, the 
most learned of their day, did once deny that this 
was a Roman road. I can well believe it, and it is 
delightful to believe that they did. For this road 
startles and controls a true man, presenting an 
eternal example of what Rome could do. The 
peasants around have always called it the '* Street." 
It leads from what was certainly one Roman town to 
what was certainly another. That sign of Roman 
occupation, the modern word *'Cold Harbour," is 
scattered up and down it. There are Roman 
pavements on it. It goes plumb straight for miles, 
and at times, wherever it crosses undisturbed land, 
it is three or four feet above the level of the down. 
Here, then, was a feast for the learned : since 
certainly the more obvious a thing is, the more 
glory there must be in denying it. And deny it 
they did (or at least, so I am told) just as they will 
deny that Thomas k Becket was a Papist, or that 



220 HILLS AND THE SEA 

Austerlitz was fought in spite of Trafalgar, or that 
the Gospel of St. John is the Gospel of St. John. 

Here, then, sitting upon this Roman road I 
considered the nature of such men, and when I 
had thought out carefully where the nearest Don 
might be at that moment, I decided that he was at 
least twenty-three miles away, and I was very glad : 
for it permitted me to contemplate the road with 
common sense and with Faith, which is Common 
Sense transfigured; and I could see the Legionaries 
climbing the hill. I remembered also what a 
sight there was upon the down above, and I got 
upon my horse again to go and see it. 

When one has pushed one's way through the 
brambles and the rounded great roots which have 
grown upon this street — where no man has walked 
perhaps for about a thousand years — one gets to 
the place where it tops the hill, and here one sees 
the way in which the line of it was first struck out. 
From where one stands, right away like a beam, 
leading from rise to rise, it runs to the cathedral 
town. You see the spot where it enters the 
eastern gate of the Roman walls ; you see at the 
end of it, like the dot upon an *' i," the mass of the 
cathedral. Then, if you turn and look northward, 
you see from point to point its taut stretch across 
the weald to where, at the very limit of the 
horizon, there is a gap in the chain of hills that 
bars your view. 



THE ROMAN ROAD 221 

The strict design of such a thing weighs upon 
one as might weigh upon one four great lines of 
Virgil, or the sight of those enormous stones which 
one comes upon, Roman also, in the Algerian 
sands. The plan of such an avenue by which to 
lead great armies and along which to drive com- 
mands argues a mixture of unity and of power as 
intimate as the lime and the sand of which these 
conquerors welded their imperishable cement. 
And it does more than this. It suggests swiftness 
and certitude of aim and a sort of eager determina- 
tion which we are slow to connect with Govern- 
ment, but which certainly underlay the triumph of 
this people. A road will give one less trouble if it 
winds about and feels the contours of the land. It 
will pay better if it is of earth and broken stones in- 
stead of being paved, nor would any one aiming at 
wealth or comfort alone laboriously raise its level, 
as the level of this road is raised. But in all that 
the Romans did there was something of a monu- 
ment. Where they might have taken pipes down 
a valley and up the opposing side they preferred 
the broad shoulders of an arcade, and where a 
seven-foot door would have done well enough to 
enter their houses by they were content with 
nothing less than an arch of fifty. In all their 
work they were conscious of some business other 
than that immediately to hand, and therefore it is 
possible that their ruins will survive the establish- 



222 HILLS AND THE SEA 

ment of our own time as they have survived that 
of the Middle Ages. In this wild place, at least, 
nothing remained of all that was done between 
their time and ours. 

These things did the sight on either side of the 
summit suggest to me, but chiefly there returned as 
I gazed the delicious thought that learned men, 
laborious and heavily endowed, had denied the 
existence of this Roman road. 

See with what manifold uses every accident 
of human life is crammed ! Here was a piece of 
pedantry and scepticism, which might make some 
men weep and some men stamp with irritation, and 
some men, from sheer boredom, fall asleep, but 
which fed in my own spirit a fountain of pure joy, 
as I considered carefully what kind of man it is who 
denies these things ; the kind of way he walks ; the 
kind of face he has; the kind of book he writes; the 
kind of publisher who chisels him ; and the kind of 
way in which his works are bound. With every 
moment my elation grew greater and more im- 
petuous, until at last I could not bear to sit any 
longer still, even upon so admirable a beast, nor to 
look down even at so rich a plain (though that was 
seen through the air of Southern England), but 
turning over the downs I galloped home, and came 
in straight from the turf to my own ground — for 
what man would live upon a high road who could 
go through a gate right off the turf to his own 
steading and let the world go hang ? 



THE ROMAN ROAD 223 

And so did I. But as they brought me beer 
and bacon at evening, and I toasted the memory 
of things past, I said to myself : *' Oxford, Cam- 
bridge, Dublin, Durham— you four great univer- 
sities—you terrors of Europe— that road is older 
than you : and meanwhile I drink to your continued 
healths, but let us have a little room . . . air, 
there, give us air, good people. I stifle when I 
think of you." 



THE ONION-EATER 

THERE is a hill not far from my home whence 
it is possible to see northward and southward 
such a stretch of land as is not to be seen from any 
eminence among those I know in Western Europe. 
Southward the sea-plain and the sea standing up 
in a belt of light against the sky, and northward 
all the weald. 

From this summit the eye is disturbed by no 
great cities of the modern sort, but a dozen at 
least of those small market towns which are the 
delight of South England hold the view from 
point to point, from the pale blue downs of the 
island over, eastward, to the Kentish hills. 

A very long way off, and near the sea-line, the 
high faint spire of that cathedral which was once 
the mother of all my county goes up without 
weight into the air and gathers round it the delicate 
and distant outlines of the landscape — as, indeed, 
its builders meant that it should do. In such a 
spot, on such a high watch-tower of England, I 
met, three days ago, a man. 

I had been riding my kind and honourable horse 

224 



THE ONION-EATER 225 

for two hours, broken, indeed, by a long rest in a 
deserted barn. 

I had been his companion, I say, for two hours, 
and had told him a hundred interesting things— to 
which he had answered nothing at all — when I took 
him along a path that neither of us yet had trod. 
I had not, I know ; he had not (I think), for he went 
snorting and doubtfully. This path broke up from 
the kennels near Waltham, and made for the High 
Wood between Gumber and No Man's Land. It 
went over dead leaves and quite lonely to the thick 
of the forest; there it died out into a vaguer and 
a vaguer trail. At last it ceased altogether, and 
for half an hour or so I pushed carefully, always 
climbing upwards, through the branches, and 
picked my way along the bramble-shoots, until at 
last I came out upon that open space of which I 
have spoken, and which I have known since my 
childhood. As I came out of the wood the south- 
west wind met me, full of the Atlantic, and it 
seemed to me to blow from Paradise. 

I remembered, as I halted and so gazed north 
and south to the weald below me, and then again 
to the sea, the story of that Sultan who publicly pro- 
claimed that he had possessed all power on earth, 
and had numbered on a tablet with his own hand 
each of his happy days, and had found them, when 
he came to die, to be seventeen. I knew what that 
heathen had meant, and I looked into my heart as 
Q 



226 HILLS AND THE SEA 

I remembered the story, but I came back from the 
examination satisfied, for **So far," I said to myself, 
**this day is among my number, and the light is 
falling. I will count it for one." It was then that 
I saw before me, going easily and slowly across 
the downs, the figure of a man. 

He was powerful, full of health and easy ; his 
clothes were rags ; his face was open and bronzed. 
I came at once off my horse to speak with him, 
and, holding my horse by the bridle, I led it for- 
ward till we met. Then I asked him whither he 
was going, and whether, as I knew these open 
hills by heart, I could not help him on his way. 

He answered me that he was in no need of help, 
for he was bound nowhere, but that he had come 
up off the high road on to the hills in order to get 
his pleasuore and also to see what there was on the 
other side. He said to me also, with evident 
enjoyment (and in the accent of a lettered man), 
** This is indeed a day to be alive ! " 

I saw that I had here some chance of an adven- 
ture, since it is not every day that one meets upon 
a lonely down a man of culture, in rags and 
happy. I therefore took the bridle right off my 
horse and let him nibble, and I sat down on the 
bank of the Roman road holding the leather of 
the bridle in my hand, and wiping the bit with 
plucked grass. The stranger sat down beside me, 
and drew from his pocket a piece of bread and a 



THE ONION-EATER 227 

large onion. We then talked of those things 
which should chiefly occupy mankind ; I mean, 
of happiness and of the destiny of the soul. Upon 
these matters I found him to be exact, thoughtful, 
and just. 

First, then, I said to him: **I also have been 
full of gladness all this day, and, what is more, as 
I came up the hill from Waltham I was inspired 
to verse, and wrote it inside my mind, completing 
a passage I had been working at for two years, 
upon joy. But it was easy for me to be happy, 
since I was on a horse and warm and well fed ; 
yet even for me such days are capricious. I have 
known but few in my life. They are each of them 
distinct and clear, so rare are they, and (what is 
more) so different are they in their very quality 
from all other days.*' 

^* You are right," he said, **in this last phrase 
of yours. . . . They are indeed quite other from 
all the common days of our lives. But you were 
wrong, I think, in saying that your horse and 
clothes and good feeding and the rest had to do 
with these curious intervals of content. Wealth 
makes the run of our days somewhat more easy, 
poverty makes them more hard — or very hard. 
But no poverty has ever yet brought of itself 
despair into the soul — the men who kill themselves 
are neither rich nor poor. Still less has wealth 
ever purchased those peculiar hours. I also am 



228 HILLS AND THE SEA 

filled with their spirit to-day, and God knows," 
said he, cutting his onion in two, so that it gave 
out a strong savour, ** God knows I can purchase 
nothing." 

**Then tell me," I said, '^whence do you believe 
these moments come? And will you give me half 
your onion?" 

** With pleasure," he replied, **for no man can 
eat a whole onion ; and as for that other matter, 
why, I think the door of heaven is ajar from time 
to time, and that light shines out upon us for a 
moment between its opening and closing." He 
said this in a merry, sober manner ; his black eyes 
sparkled, and his large beard was blown about a 
little by the wind. Then he added : ** If a man is 
a slave to the rich in the great cities (the most 
miserable of mankind), yet these days come to him. 
To the vicious wealthy and privileged men, whose 
faces are stamped hard with degradation, these days 
come ; they come to you, you say, working (I sup- 
pose) in anxiety like most of men. They come to 
me who neither work nor am anxious so long as 
South England may freely import onions." 

**I believe you are right," I said. **And I 
especially commend you for eating onions ; they 
contain all health ; they induce sleep ; they may 
be called the apples of content, or, again, the 
companion-fruits of mankind." 

**I have always said," he answered gravely, 



THE ONION-EATER 229 

^*that when the couple of them left Eden they hid 
and took away with them an onion. I am moved 
in my soul to have known a man who reveres and 
loves them in the due measure, for such men are 



rare." 



Then he asked, with evident anxiety : ** Is there 
no inn about here where a man like me will be 
taken in ? " 

** Yes," I told him. *^ Down under the Combe 
at Duncton is a very good inn. Have you money 
to pay? Will you take some of my money?" 

" I will take all you can possibly afford me," he 
answered in a cheerful, manly fashion. I counted 
out my money and found I had on me but 3s. jd, 
^* Here is 3s. 7d.," I said. 

** Thank you, indeed," he answered, taking the 
coins and wrapping them in a little rag (for he had 
no pockets, but only holes). 

* * I wish," I said with regret, * ' we might meet and 
talk more often of many things. So much do we 
agree, and men like you and me are often lonely." 

He shrugged his shoulders and put his head on 
one side, quizzing at me with his eyes. Then he 
shook his head decidedly, and said : '*No, no — it 
is certain that we shall never meet again." And 
thanking me with great fervour, but briefly, he 
went largely and strongly down the escarpment of 
the Combe to Duncton and the weald ; and I shall 
never see him again till the Great Day. . . . 



THE RETURN TO ENGLAND 

IN Calais harbour, it being still very early in the 
morning, about half-past five, I peered out to 
see how things were looking, for if that coast 
corresponded at all to ours, the tide should be 
making westerly by six o'clock that day — the ebb 
tide — and it was on the first of that tide that I 
should make the passage to England, for at sea 
you never can tell. At sea you never can tell, and 
you must take every inch the gods allow you. 
You will need that and more very often before 
evening. Now, as I put my head out I saw that I 
could not yet start, for there was a thick white 
mist over everything, so that I could not even see 
the bowsprit of my own boat. Everything was 
damp : the decks smelt of fog, and from the shore 
came sounds whose cause I could not see. Look- 
ing over the iron bulwarks of the big English 
cargo ship, alongside of which I was moored, was 
a man with his head upon his folded arms. He 
told me that he thought the fog would lift ; and so 
I waited, seeking no more sleep, but sitting up 
there in the drifting fog, and taking pleasure in a 

230 



THE RETURN TO ENGLAND 231 

bugle call which the French call ** La Diane," 
and which they play to wake the soldiers. But in 
summer it wakes nobody, for all the world is 
waking long before. 

Towards six the mist blew clean away before a 
little air from the north-east ; it had come sharp 
over those miles and miles of sand dunes and flats 
which stretch away from Gris-nez on to Denmark. 
From Gris-nez all the way to the Sound there is 
no other hill ; but coarse grass, wind-swept and 
flying sand. Finding this wind, I very quickly set 
sail, and as I did not know the harbour I let down 
the peak of the mainsail, that she might sail 
slowly, and crept along close to the eastern pier, 
for fear that when I got to the open work the 
westerly tide should drive me against the western 
pier ; but there was no need for all this caution, 
since the tide was not yet making strongly. Yet 
was I wise to beware, for if you give the strange 
gods of the sea one little chance they will take a 
hundred, and drown you for their pleasure. And 
sailing, if you sail in all weathers, is a perpetual 
game of skill against them, the heartiest and most 
hazardous game in the world. 

So then, when I had got well outside, I found 
what is called *^a lump." The sea was jumbling 
up and down irregularly, as though great animals 
had just stopped fighting there. But whatever 
was the cause of it, this lump made it difficult to 



232 HILLS AND THE SEA 

manage the boat I was in, for the air was still light 
and somewhat unsteady ; sometimes within a point 
of north, and then again dropping and rising free 
within a point of east : on the whole, north-east. 
To windward the sea was very clear, but down 
towards the land there was a haze, and when I got 
to that black buoy which is three miles from 
Calais, and marks the place where you should turn 
to go into the harbour, I could barely see the high 
land glooming through the weather, and Calais 
belfry and lighthouse tower I could not see at 
all. I looked at my watch and saw it was seven, 
and immediately afterwards the wind became 
steady and true, and somewhat stronger, and the 
work began. 

She would point very nearly north, and so I laid 
her for that course, though that would have taken 
me right outside the Goodwins, for I knew that 
the tide was making westerly down the Channel, 
ebbing away faster and faster, and that, like a man 
crossing a rapid river in a ferry-boat, I had to 
point up far above where I wanted to land, which 
was at Dover, the nearest harbour. I sailed her, 
therefore, I say, as close as she would lie, and the 
wind rose. 

The wind rose, and for half an hour I kept her 
to it. She had no more sail than she needed ; she 
heeled beautifully and strongly to the wind ; she 
took the seas, as they ran more regular, with a 



THE RETURN TO ENGLAND 233 

motion of mastery. It was like the gesture of a 
horse when he bends his head back to his chest, 
arching his neck with pride as he springs upon 
our Downs at morning. So set had the surging 
of the sea become that she rose and fell to it with 
rhythm, and the helm could be kept quite steady, 
and the regular splash of the rising bows and the 
little wisps of foam came in ceaseless exactitude 
like the marching of men, and in all this one 
mixed with the life of the sea. 

But before it was eight o'clock (and I had eaten 
nothing) the wind got stronger still, and I was 
anxious and gazed continuously into it, up to 
windward, seeing the white caps beginning on the 
tops of the seas, although the wind and tide were 
together. She heeled also much more, and my 
anxiety hardened with the wind, for the wind had 
strengthened by about half past eight, so that it 
was very strong indeed, and she was plainly over- 
canvased, her lee rail under all the time and all 
the cordage humming ; there it stood, and by the 
grace and mercy of God the wind increased no 
more, for its caprice might have been very different. 

Then began that excellent game which it is so 
hard to play, but so good to remember, and in 
which all men, whether they admit it or not, are 
full of fear, but it is a fear so steeped in exhilara- 
tion that one would think the personal spirit of the 
sea was mingled with the noise of the air. 



234 HILLS AND THE SEA 

For a whole great hour she roared and lifted 
through it still, taking the larger seas grandly, 
with disdain, as she had taken the smaller, and 
still over the buried lee rail the stream of the sea 
went by rejoicing and pouring, and the sheets and 
the weather runner trembled with the vigour of the 
charge, and on she went, and on. I was weary of 
the seas ahead (for each and individually they 
struck my soul as they came, even more strongly 
than they struck the bows — steep, curling, uninter- 
mittent, rank upon rank upon rank, an innumer- 
able cavalry) ; still watching them, I say, I groped 
round with my hand behind the cabin door and 
pulled out brandy and bread, and drank brandy and 
ate bread, still watching the seas. And, as men 
are proud of their companions in danger, so I was 
proud to see the admirable lift and swing of that 
good boat, and to note how, if she slowed for a 
moment under the pounding, she recovered with a 
stride, rejoicing ; and as for my fears, which were 
now fixed and considerable, I found this argument 
against them : that, though I could see nothing 
round me but the sea, yet soon I should be under 
the lee of the Goodwins, for, though I could not 
exactly calculate my speed, and though in the 
haze beyond nothing appeared, it was certain that 
I was roaring very quickly towards the further 
shore. 

When, later, the sea grew confused and full of 



THE RETURN TO ENGLAND 235 

swirls and boiling, I said to myself: ^*This must 
be the tail of the Goodwins." But it was not. 
For, though I did not know it, the ebb of the 
great spring tide had carried me right away down 
Channel, and there was not twelve feet of water 
under the keel, for the seething of the sea that I 
noticed came from the Varne — the Varne, that 
curious, long, steep hill, with its twin ridge close 
by, the Colbert ; they stand right up in the 
Channel between France and England ; they very 
nearly lift their heads above the waves. I passed 
over the crest of them, unknowing, into the deep 
beyond, and still the ship raced on. Then, some- 
what suddenly, so suddenly that I gave a cry, I 
saw right up above me, through what was now a 
thick haze, the cliffs of England, perhaps two 
miles away, and showing very faintly indeed, a 
bare outline upon the white weather. A thought 
ran into my mind with violence, how, one behind 
the other, beyond known things, beyond history, 
the men from whom I came had greeted this sight 
after winds like these and danger and the crossing 
of the narrow seas. I looked at my watch ; it was 
ten o'clock, so that this crossing had taken three 
hours, and to see the land again like that was 
better than any harbour, and I knew that all those 
hours my mind had been at strain. I looked again 
at the vague cliffs narrowly, thinking them the 
South Foreland, but as they cleared I saw to my 



236 HILLS AND THE SEA 

astonishment that I had blown all down the Straits, 
and that Folkestone and the last walls of the chalk 
were before me. 

The wind dropped ; the sea went on uneasily, 
tumbling and rolling, but within a very little 
while — before eleven, I think — there was no breeze 
at all ; and there I lay, with Folkestone harbour 
not a mile away, but never any chance of getting 
there ; and I whistled, but no wind came. I sat 
idle and admired the loneliness of the sea. Till, 
towards one, a little draught of air blew slantwise 
from the land, and under it I crept to the smooth 
water within the stone arm of the breakwater, and 
there I let the anchor go, and, settling everything, 
I slept. 

It is pleasant to remember these things. 



THE VALLEY OF THE ROTHER 

THERE is in that part of England which is 
very properly called her Eden (that centre of 
all good things and home of happy men, the 
county of Sussex), there is, I say, in that exalted 
county a valley which I shall praise for your 
greater pleasure, because I know that it is too 
jealously guarded for any run of strangers to 
make it common, and because I am very sure that 
you may go and only make it the more delightful 
by your presence. It is the valley of the River 
Rother; the sacred and fruitful river between the 
downs and the weald. 

Now here many travelling men, bicyclists even 
and some who visit for a livelihood, will think I 
mean the famous River Rother that almost reaches 
the sea. The Rother into which the foreigners 
sailed for so many hundred years, the River 
of the Marshes, the river on which stands Rye; 
the easy Rother along whose deep meadows are 
the sloping kilns, the bright tiled towns and 
the steep roads; the red Rother that is fed by 
streams from the ironstone. This Rother also alj 

237 



238 HILLS AND THE SEA 

good men know and love, both those that come in 
for pleasure, strangers of Kent, and those that 
have a distant birthright in East Sussex, being 
born beyond Ouse in the Rape of Bramber. 

But it is not this Rother that I am telling of, 
though I would love to tell of it also — as indeed I 
would love to tell at length of all the rivers of 
Sussex — the Brede, the Ouse, the Adur, the 
Cuckmere ; all the streams that cut the chalk hills. 
But for this I have no space and you no patience. 
Neither can I tell you of a thousand adventures 
and wonderful hazards along the hills and valley 
of this eastern Rother ; of how I once through a 
telescope on Brightling Hill saw the meet at 
Battle, and of how it looked quite near ; of how I 
leapt the River Rother once, landing on the far 
side safely (which argues the river narrow or the 
leap tremendous) ; of how I poached in the wood 
of a friend who is still my friend ; of how I rode a 
horse into Robertsbridge ; of the inn. All these 
things could I tell with growing fervour, and to 
all these would you listen with an increasing 
delight. But I must write of the River Rother 
under Petworth, the other Rother in the West. 
Why? Because I started out so to do, and no 
man should let himself be led away by a word, or 
by any other such little thing. 

Let me therefore have done with this eastern 
river, far away from my home, a river at the end 



VALLEY OF THE ROTHER 239 

of long journeys, and speak of that other noble 
Rother, the Rother of quiet men, the valley that is 
like a shrine in England. 

Many famous towns and villages stand in the 
valley of this river and even (some of them) upon 
its very banks. Thus there are the three principal 
towns of this part, Midhurst and Petworth and 
Pulborough : but these have been dealt with and 
written of in so many great books and by such a 
swarm of new men, that I have no business further 
to describe their merits and antiquity. But this I 
will add to all that is known of them. Midhurst 
takes its name from standing in the middle, for it 
is half way between the open downs and the thick 
woods on the borders of Surrey. Petworth has 
a steeple that slopes to one side ; not so much 
as Chesterfield, but somewhat more than most 
steeples. Pulborough stands upon a hill, and is 
famous for its corn-market, to which people come 
from far and near, from as far off as Burpham or 
as close by as Bury. All these noble towns have 
(as I said before) been written of in books, only no 
book that I know puts them all together and calls 
them *<the Valley of the Rother." That is the 
title that such a book should have if it is to treat 
of the heart of West Sussex, and I make no doubt 
that such a book would be read lovingly by many 
men. 

For the Valley of the Rother breeds men and is 



240 HILLS AND THE SEA 

the cause of many delightful villages, all the homes 
of men. I know that Cobden was born there, the 
last of the yeomen : I hope that Cobbett lived here 
too. Manning was here in his short married life; 
he lived at Barlton (which foolish men call Bar- 
lavington), under the old Downs, where the steep 
woods make a hollow. In this valley also are 
Fittleworth (the only place in England that rhymes 
with Little Worth) ; Duncton, about which there 
is nothing to be said ; Burton, which is very old 
and has its church right in the grounds of the 
house ; West-burton, where the racehorses were ; 
Graffham, Bignor, Sutton, and I know not how 
many delightful hamlets. 

In the Valley of the River Rother no hurried 
men ever come, for it leads nowhere. They cross 
it now and then, and they forget it ; but who, unless 
he be a son or a lover, has really known that 
plain ? It leads nowhere : to the no man*s land, 
the broken country by Liss. It has in it no curious 
sight, but only beauty. The rich men in it (and 
thank Heaven they are few) are of a reticent 
and homing kind, or (when the worst comes to 
the worst) they have estates elsewhere, and go north 
for their pleasure. 

Foxes are hunted in the Valley of the Rother, but 
there are not very many. Pheasants and partridges 
are shot, but I never heard of great bags ; one 
animal indeed there is in profusion. The rabbit 



VALLEY OF THE ROTHER 241 

swarms and exults in this life of Southern England, 
Do you stalk him? He sits and watches you. 
Do you hunt him with dogs? He thinks it a vast 
pother about a very little matter. Do you ferret 
him ? He dies, and rejoices to know that so many 
more will take his place. The rabbit is the sacred 
emblem of my river, and when we have a symbol, 
he shall be our symbol. He loves men and eats 
the things they plant, especially the tender shoots 
of young trees, wheat, and the choice roots in 
gardens. He only remains, and is happy all his 
little life in the valley from which we depart when 
our boyhood ends. 

The Valley of the Rother is made of many parts. 
There is the chalk of the Southern Down-land, 
the belt of the loam beneath it ; then the curious 
country of sand, full of dells and dark with pine 
woods ; then the luxurious meadows, which are 
open and full of cattle, colts, and even sheep ; 
then the woods. It is, in a few miles, a little 
England. There are also large heaths — larger, you 
would think, than such a corner of the earth could 
contain ; old elms and oaks ; many wide parks ; 
fish ponds ; one trout stream and half a score of 
mills. There are men of many characters, but all 
happy, honest, good, witty, and hale. And when 
I have said all I could say of this delightful place 
(which indeed I think is set apart for the reward of 
virtue) I should not have given you a tithe of its 



242 HILLS AND THE SEA 

prosperity and peace and beneficence. There is 
the picture of the Valley of the River Rother. It 
flows in a short and happy murmur from the 
confined hills by Hindhead to the Arun itself; but 
of the Arun no one could write with any justice 
except at the expense of far more space and time 
than I have given me. 

If ever again we have a religion in the South 
Country, we will have a temple to my darling 
valley. It shall be round, with columns and a 
wall, and there I will hang a wreath in thanks- 
giving for having known the river. 



THE CORONATION 

MY companion said to me that there was a 
doom over the day and the reign and the 
times, and that the turn of the nation had come. 
He felt it in the sky. 

The day had been troubled : from the forest 
ridge to the sea there was neither wind nor sun, 
but a dull, even heat oppressed the fields and the 
high downs under an uncertain, half-luminous 
confusion of grey clouds. It was as though a 
relief was being denied, and as though something 
inexorable had come into that air which is nor- 
mally the softest and most tender in the world. 
The hours of the low tide were too silent. The 
little inland river was quite dead, the reeds beside 
it dry and motionless ; even in the trees about it 
no leaves stirred. 

In the late afternoon, as the heat grew more 
masterful, a slight wind came out of the east. It 
was so faint and doubtful in quantity that one 
could not be certain, as one stood on the deserted 
shore, whether it blew from just off the land or 
from the sullen level of the sea. It followed along 
the line of the coast without refreshment and with- 
out vigour, even hotter than had been the still air 

243 



244 HILLS AND THE SEA 

out of which it was engendered. It did not do 
more than ruffle here and there the uneasy surface 
of our sea ; that surface moved a little, but with a 
motion borrowed from nothing so living or so 
natural as the wind. It was a dull memory of 
past storms, or perhaps that mysterious heaving 
from the lower sands which sailors know, but 
which no science has yet explained. 

In such an influence of expectation and of pre- 
sage — an influence having in it that quality which 
seemed to the ancients only Fate, but to us 
moderns a something evil — in the strained atten- 
tion for necessary and immovable things that can- 
not hear and cannot pity — the hour came for me to 
reascend the valley to my home. Already upon 
the far and confused horizon two or three motion- 
less sails that had been invisible began to show 
white against a rising cloud. This cloud had not 
the definition of sudden conquering storms, proper 
to the summer, and leaving a blessing behind 
their fury. The edge of it against the misty and 
brooding sky had all the vagueness of smoke, and 
as it rose up out of the sea its growth was so 
methodical and regular as to disconnect it wholly 
in one's mind from the little fainting breeze that 
still blew, from rain, or from any daily thing. It 
advanced with the fall of the evening till it held 
half the sky. There it seemed halted for a while, 
and lent by contrast an unnatural brightness to 



THE CORONATION 245 

the parched hills beneath it ; for now the sun hav- 
ing set, we had come north of the gap, and were 
looking southward upon that spectacle as upon 
the climax of a tragedy. But there was nothing of 
movement or of sound. No lightning, no thunder ; 
and soon the hot breath of the afternoon had itself 
disappeared before the advance of this silent pall. 
The night of June to the north was brighter than 
twilight, and still southward, a deliberate spectacle, 
stood this great range of vague and menacing 
cloud, shutting off the sky and towering above the 
downs, so that it seemed permissible to ascribe to 
those protecting gods of our valley a burden of fear. 
Just when all that scene had been arranged to 
an adjustment that no art could have attained, the 
first great fire blazed out miles and miles to the 
west, somewhere above Midhurst : I think near No 
Man's Land. Then we saw, miles to the east 
again, a glare over Mount Harry, the signal of 
Lewes, and one after another all the heights took 
it up in a chain — above Bramber, above Poynings, 
above Wiston, on Amberley Mount (I think), cer- 
tainly on the noble sweep of Bury. Even in those 
greater distances which the horizon concealed they 
were burning and answering each other into 
Hampshire : perhaps on the beaten grass of the 
high forts above Portsmouth, and to the left away 
to the flat Rye level, and to the eastern Rother ; for 
we saw the line of red angry upon that cloud 



246 HILLS AND THE SEA 

which had come to receive it, an endless line 
which suddenly called up what one had heard old 
men. say of the prairie fires. 

It was easy, without covering the face and with- 
out abstracting the mind from the whirl of modern 
circumstance, it was easy, merely looking at the 
thing, to be seized with an impression of disaster. 
The stars were so pale on the lingering white light 
of the pure north, the smoky cloud so deep and 
heavy and steadfast and low above the hills, the 
fire so near to it, so sharp against it, and so huge, 
that the awe and sinister meaning of conflagrations 
dominated the impression of all the scene. There 
arose in the mind that memory which associates 
such a glare and the rising and falling fury of 
flames with sacrifice or with vengeance, or with the 
warning of an enemy's approach, or with the mark 
of his conquest ; for with such things our race (for 
how many thousand years !) has watched the fires 
upon the hills far off. It touched one as does the 
reiterated note of a chaunt ; if not with an im- 
pression of doom, at least with that of calamity. 

When the fires had died down to a sullen glow, 
and the men watching them had gone home under 
the weight of what they had seen, the storm broke 
and occupied the whole sky. A very loud wind 
rose and a furious rain fell. It became suddenly 
cold ; there was thunder all over the weald, and the 
lightning along the unseen crest of the downs 
answered the lightning above the forest. 



THE MEN OF THE DESERT 

I LAY once alone upon the crest of a range 
whose name I have never seen spelt, but which 
is pronounced ** Haueedja," from whence a man 
can see right away for ever the expanse of the 
Sahara. 

It is well known that Mount Atlas and those 
inhabited lands where there is a sufficient rainfall 
and every evidence of man's activity, the Province 
of Africa, the plateaux which are full of the 
memories of Rome, end abruptly towards the sun, 
and are bounded by a sort of cliff which falls sheer 
upon the desert. On the summit of this cliff I lay 
and looked down upon the sand. It was impressed 
upon my mind that here was an influence quite 
peculiar, not to be discovered in any other climate 
of the world ; that all Europe received that influ- 
ence, and yet that no one in Europe had accepted 
it save for his hurt. 

God forbid that any man should pretend that the 
material environment of mankind determines the 
destiny of mankind. Those who say such things 
have abandoned the domain of intelligence. But 

247 



248 HILLS AND THE SEA 

it is true that the soul eagerly seeks for and receives 
the impressions of the world about it^ and will be 
moved to a different creed or to a different poetry, 
according as the body perceives the sea or the hills 
or the rainless and inhuman places which lie to the 
south of Europe ; and certainly the souls of those 
races which have inhabited the great zone of calms 
between the trade winds and the tropics, those 
races which have felt nothing beneficent, but only 
something awful and unfamiliar in the earth and 
sky, have produced a peculiar philosophy. 

It is to be remarked that this philosophy is not 
atheist ; those races called Semitic have never 
denied either the presence or the personality of 
God. It is, on the contrary, their boast that they 
have felt His presence. His unity, and His person- 
ality in a manner more pointed than have the rest 
of mankind ; and those of us who pretend to find 
in the Desert a mere negation, are checked by the 
thought that within the Desert the most positive of 
religions have appeared. Indeed, to deny God 
has been the sad privilege of very few in any 
society of men ; and those few, if it be examined, 
have invariably been men in whom the power to 
experience was deadened, usually by luxury, 
sometimes by distress. 

It is not atheist ; but whatever it is, it is hurtful, 
and has about it something of the despair and 
strength of atheism. Consider the Book of Job ; 



THE MEN OF THE DESERT 249 

consider the Arab Mohammedan ; consider the 
fierce heresies which besieged the last of the 
Romans in this Province of Africa, and which 
tortured the short history of the Vandals ; consider 
the modern tragedies which develop among the 
French soldiers to the north and to the south of 
this wide belt of sand ; and you will see that the 
thing which the Sahara and its prolongation pro- 
duce is something evil, or at least to us evil. 
There is in the idea running through the mind 
of the Desert an intensity which may be of some 
value to us if it be diluted by a large admixture of 
European tradition, or if it be mellowed and trans- 
formed by a long process of time, but which, if 
we take it at its source and inspire ourselves 
directly from it, warps and does hurt to our Euro- 
pean sense. 

It may be taken that whatever form truth takes 
among men will be the more perfect in proportion 
as the men who receive that form are more fully 
men. The whole of truth can never be com- 
prehended by anything finite ; and truth as it 
appears to this species or to that is most true when 
the type which receives it is the healthiest and the 
most normal of its own kind. The truth as it is to 
men is most true when the men who receive it are 
the healthiest and the most normal of men. We 
in Europe are the healthiest and most normal of 
our kind. It is to us that the world must look for 



250 HILLS AND THE SEA 

its headship ; we have the harbours, the continual 
presence of the sea through all our polities ; we 
have that high differentiation between the various 
parts of our unity which makes the whole of Europe 
so marvellous an organism ; we alone change 
without suffering decay. To the truth as Europe 
accepts it I cannot but bow down ; for if that is 
not the truth, then the truth is not to be found 
upon earth. But there comes upon us perpetually 
that '* wind of Africa" ; and it disturbs us. As I 
lay that day, a year ago, upon the crest of the 
mountain, my whole mind was possessed with the 
influence of such a gale. 

Day after day, after day, the silent men of the 
Desert go forward across its monotonous horizons ; 
their mouths are flanked with those two deep lines 
of patience and of sorrow which you may note to- 
day in all the ghettoes of Europe ; their smile, 
when they smile, is restrained by a sort of ironic 
strength in the muscles of the face. Their eyes 
are more bright than should be eyes of happy 
men ; they are, as it were, inured to sterility ; 
there is nothing in them of that repose which we 
Westerners acquire from a continual contempla- 
tion of deep pastures and of innumerable leaves ; 
they are at war, not only among themselves, but 
against the good earth ; in a silent and powerful 
way they are also afraid. 

You may note that their morals are an angry 



THE MEN OF THE DESERT 251 

series of unexplained commands, and that their 
worship does not include that fringe of half- 
reasonable, wholly pleasing things which the true 
worship of a true God must surely contain. All 
is as clear-cut as their rocks, and as unfruitful as 
their dry valleys, and as dreadful as their brazen 
sky; **thou shalt not" this, that, and the other. 
Their god is jealous ; he is vengeful ; he is (awfully 
present and real to them !) a vision of that demon 
of which we in our happier countries make a quaint 
legend. He catches men out and trips them up ; 
he has but little relation to the Father of Christian 
men, who made the downs of South England and 
the high clouds above them. 

The good uses of the world are forgotten in the 
Desert, or fiercely denied. Love is impure; so are 
birth, and death, and eating, and every other 
necessary part in the life of a man. And yet, 
though all these things are impure, there is no 
lustration. We also feel in a genial manner that 
this merry body of ours requires apology ; but 
those others to the south of us have no toleration 
in their attitude ; they are awfully afraid. 

I have continually considered, as I have read 
my history, the special points in which their in- 
fluence is to be observed in the development of 
Europe. It takes the form of the great heresies ; 
the denial of the importance of matter (sometimes 
of its existence) ; the denial that anything but 



252 HILLS AND THE SEA 

matter exists ; the denial of the family ; the denial 
of ownership ; the over-simplicity which is pecu- 
liarly a Desert product runs through all such 
follies, as does the rejection of a central and govern- 
ing power upon earth, which is again just such a 
rebellion as the Desert would bring. I say the 
great heresies are the main signs of that in- 
fluence ; but it is in small and particular matters 
that you may see its effect most clearly. 

For instance, the men of the Desert are afraid 
of wine. They have good reason ; if you drink 
wine in the Desert you die. In the Desert, a man 
can drink only water ; and, when he gets it, it is 
like diamonds to him, or, better still, it is like 
rejuvenation. All our long European legends 
which denounce and bring a curse upon the men 
who are the enemies of wine, are legends inspired 
by our hatred of the thing which is not Europe, 
and that bounds Europe, and is the enemy of 
Europe. 

So also with their attachment to numbers. For 
instance, the seventh day must have about it some- 
thing awful and oppressive ; the fast must be 
seven times seven days, and so forth. We Euro- 
peans have always smiled in our hearts at these 
things. We would take this day or that, and 
make up a scheme of great and natural com- 
plexity, full of interlacing seasons ; and nearly all 
our special days were days of rejoicing. We 



THE MEN OF THE DESERT 253 

carried images about our fields further to develop 
and enhance the nature of our religion ; we dedi- 
cated trees and caves ; and the feasts of one place 
were not the feasts of another. But to the men of 
the Desert mere unfruitful number was a god. 

Then again, the word, especially the written 
word, the document, overshadows their mind. It 
has always had for them a power of something 
mysterious. To engrave characters was to cast a 
spell ; and when they seek for some infallible 
authority upon earth, they can only discover it in 
the written characters traced in a sacred book. All 
their expression of worship is wrought through 
symbols. With us, the symbol is clearly retained 
separate from that for which it stands, though 
hallowed by that for which it stands. With them 
the symbol is the whole object of affection. 

On this account you will find in the men of the 
Desert a curious panic in the presence of statues, 
which is even more severe than the panic they 
suffer in the presence of wine. It is as though 
they said to themselves : ** Take this away ; if you 
leave it here I shall worship it." They are subject 
to possession. 

Side by side with this fear of the graphic repre- 
sentation of men or of animals, you will find in 
them an incapacity to represent them well. The 
art of the iconoclasts is either childish, weak, or, 
at its strongest, evil. 



254 HILLS AND THE SEA 

And especially among all these symptoms of 
the philosophy from which they suffer is their 
manner of comprehending the nature of creation. 
Of creation in any form they are afraid ; and the 
infinite Creator is on that account present to them 
almost as though He were a man, for when we are 
afraid of things we see them very vividly indeed. 
On this account you will find in the legends of 
the men of the Desert all manner of fantastic 
tales incomprehensible to us Europeans, wherein 
God walks, talks, eats, and wrestles. Nor is there 
any trace in this attitude of theirs of parable or of 
allegory. That mixture of the truth, and of a subtle 
unreal glamour which expands and confirms the 
truth, is a mixture proper to our hazy landscapes, 
to our drowsy woods, and to our large vision. 
We, who so often see from our high village 
squares soft and distant horizons, mountains now 
near, now very far, according as the weather 
changes : we, who are perpetually feeling the 
transformation of the seasons, and who are im- 
mersed in a very ocean of manifold and mysterious 
life, we need, create, and live by legends. The 
line between the real and the imaginary is vague 
and penumbral to us. We are justly influenced 
by our twilights, and our imagination teaches us. 
How many deities have we not summoned up to 
inhabit groves and lakes — special deities who are 
never seen, but yet have never died ? 



THE MEN OF THE DESERT 255 

To the men of the Desert, doubt and beauty 
mingled in this fashion seemed meaningless. 
That which they worship they see and almost 
handle. In the dreadful silence which surrounds 
them, their illusions turn into convictions — the 
haunting voices are heard : the forms are seen. 

Of two further things, native to us, their starved 
experience has no hold ; of nationality (or, if the 
term be preferred, of *' The City ") and of what we 
have come to call ** chivalry." The two are but 
aspects of one thing without a name ; but that thing 
all Europeans possess, nor is it possible for us to 
conceive of a patriotism unless it is a patriotism 
which is chivalric. In our earliest stories, we honour 
men fighting odds. Our epics are of small numbers 
against great ; humility and charity are in them, 
lending a kind of magic strength to the sword. 
The Faith did not bring in that spirit, but rather 
completed it. Our boundaries have always been 
intensely sacred to us. We are not passionate to 
cross them save for the sake of adventure j but we 
are passionate to defend them. In all that enor- 
mous story of Rome, from the dim Etrurian origins 
right up to the end of her thousand years, the 
Wall of the Town was more sacred than the limits 
of the Empire. 

The men of the Desert do not understand these 
things. They are by compulsion nomad, and for 
ever wandering ; they strike no root ; their pride 



256 HILLS AND THE SEA 

is in a mere expansion ; they must colonize or fail ; 
nor does any man die for a city. 

As I looked from the mountain, I thought the 
Desert which I had come so far to see had ex- 
plained to me what hitherto I had not understood 
in the mischances of Europe. I remained for a 
long while looking out upon the glare. 

But when I came down again, northward from 
the high sandstone hill, and was in the fields 
again near running water, and drinking wine from 
a cup carved with Roman emblems, I began to 
wonder whether the Desert had not put before my 
mind, as they say it can do before the eye of the 
traveller, a mirage. 

Is there such an influence? Are there such 
men ? 



THE DEPARTURE 

/^NCE, in Barbary, I grew tired of unusual 
^^ things, especially of palms, and desired to 
return to Europe and the things I knew ; so I went 
down from the hills to the sea coast, and when 
after two days I had reached the railway, I took 
a train for Algiers and reached that port at 
evening. 

From Algiers it is possible to go at once and 
for almost any sum one chooses to any part of the 
world. The town is on the sharp slope of a 
theatre of hills, and in the quiet harbour below it 
there are all sorts of ships, but mostly steamships, 
moored with their sterns towards the quay. For 
there is no tide here, and the ships can lie quite 
still. 

I sat upon a wall of the upper town and con- 
sidered how each of these ships was going to 
some different place, and how pleasant it was 
to roam about the world. Behind the ships, 
along the stone quays, were a great number of 
wooden huts, of offices built into archways, of 
little houses, booths, and dens, in each of which 
s 257 



258 HILLS AND THE SEA 

you could take your passage to some place or 
other. 

*^ Now," said I to myself, *^ now is the time to 
be free." For one never feels master of oneself 
unless one is obeying no law, plan, custom, trend, 
or necessity, but simply spreading out at ease and 
occupying the world. In this also Aristotle was 
misled by fashion, or was ill-informed by some 
friend of his, or was, perhaps, lying for money 
when he said that liberty was obedience to a self- 
made law ; for the most distant hint of law is 
odious to liberty. True, it is more free to obey 
a law of one's own making than of some one 
else's ; just as if a man should give himself a 
punch in the eye it would be less hurtful and far 
less angering than one given by a passer-by ; yet 
to suffer either would not be a benefit of freedom. 
Liberty cannot breathe where the faintest odour 
of regulation is to be discovered, but only in that 
ether whose very nature is largeness. Oh ! 
Diviner Air ! how few have drunk you, and in 
what deep draughts have I ! 

I had a great weight of coined, golden, metallic 
money all loose in my pocket. There was no call 
upon me nor any purpose before me. I spent an 
hour looking down upon the sea and the steam- 
ships, and taking my pick out of all the world. 

One thing, however, guided me, which was 
this : that desire, to be satisfied at all, must be 



THE DEPARTURE 259 

satisfied at once ; and of the many new countries 
I might seek that would most attract me whose 
ship was starting soonest. So I looked round for 
mooring cables in the place of anchor chains, for 
Blue Peter, for smoke from funnels, for little boats 
coming and going, and for all that shows a steam- 
boat to be off; when I saw, just behind a large 
new boat in such a condition of bustle, a sign in 
huge yellow letters staring on a bright black 
ground, which said: *^To the Balearic Islands, 
eight shillings " ; underneath, in smaller yellow 
letters, was written: ** Gentlemen The Honour- 
able Travellers are warned that they must pay for 
any food they consume.'* When I had read this 
notice I said to myself: ** I will go to the Balearic 
Islands, of which the rich have never heard. I, 
poor and unencumbered, will go and visit these 
remote places, which have in their time received 
all the influences of the world, and which yet have 
no history ; for I am tired of this Africa, where so 
many men are different from me." As I said this 
to myself I saw a little picture in my mind of three 
small islands standing in the middle of the sea, 
quite alone, and inhabited by happy men ; but 
this picture, as it always is with such pictures, 
was not at all the same as what I saw when next 
morning the islands rose along the north to which 
we steered. 

I went down to the quay by some large stone 



260 HILLS AND THE SEA 

steps which an Englishman had built many years 
ago, and I entered the office above which this 
great sign was raised. Within was a tall man of 
doubtful race, smoking a cigarette made of loose 
paper, and gazing kindly at the air. He was full 
of reveries. Of this man I asked when the boat 
would be starting. He told me it started in half 
an hour, a little before the setting of the sun. So 
I bought a ticket for eight shillings, upon which 
it was clearly printed in two languages that I had 
bound myself to all manner of things by the pur- 
chase, and especially that I might not go below, 
but must sit upon deck all night ; nevertheless, 
I was glad to hold that little bit of printed prose, 
for it would enable me to reach the Balearic 
Islands, which for all other men are names in a 
dream. I then went up into the town of Algiers, 
and was careful to buy some ham from a Jew, 
some wine from a Mohammedan, and some bread 
and chocolate from a very indifferent Christian. 
After that I got aboard. As I came over the side 
I heard the sailors, stokers, and people all talking 
to each other in low tones, and I at once recog- 
nized the tongue called Catalan. 

I had heard this sort of Latin in many places, 
some lonely and some populous. I had heard it 
once from a chemist at Perpignan who dressed a 
wound of mine, and this was the first time I heard 
it. Very often after in the valleys of the Pyrenees, 



THE DEPARTURE 261 

in the Cerdagne, and especially in Andorra, hun- 
dreds of men had spoken to me in Catalan. At 
Urgel, that notable city where there is only one 
shop and where the streets are quite narrow and 
Moorish, a woman and six or seven men had 
spoken Catalan to me for nearly one hour : it was 
in a cellar surrounded by great barrels, and I 
remember it well. So, also, on the River Noguera, 
coming up again into the hills, a girl who took 
the toll at the wooden bridge had spoken Catalan 
to me. But none of these had I ever answered so 
that they could understand, and on this account 
I was very grieved to hear the Catalan tongue, 
though I remembered that if I spoke to them with 
ordinary Spanish words or in French with a 
strong Southern accent they would usually have 
some idea of what I was saying. 

As the evening fell the cables were slipped with- 
out songs, and with great dignity, rapidity, and 
order the ship was got away. 

I knew a man once, a seafaring man, a Scotch- 
man, with whom I travelled on a very slow old 
boat in the Atlantic, who told me that the Northern 
people of Europe were bravest in an unexpected 
danger, but the Southern in a danger long fore- 
seen. He said he had known many of both kinds, 
and had served under them and commanded them. 
He said that in sudden accident the Northerner 
was the more reliable man, but that if an act of 



262 HILLS AND THE SEA 

great danger had to be planned and coolly 
achieved, then the Southerner was strongest in 
doing what he had to do. He said that in taking 
the ground he would rather have a Northern, but 
in bringing in a short ship a Southern crew. 

He was a man who observed closely, and never 
said a thing because he had read it. Indeed, he 
did not read, and he had in a little hanging shelf 
above his bunk only four or five tattered books, 
and even these were magazines. I remembered 
his testimony now as I watched these Catalans 
letting the ship go free, and I believed it, com- 
paring it with history and the things I had myself 
seen. They did everything with such regularity 
and so silently that it was a different deck from 
what one would have had in the heave of the 
Channel. With Normans or Bretons, or Cornish- 
men or men of Kent, but especially with men 
from London river, there would have been all 
sorts of cursing and bellowing, and they could 
not have touched a rope without throwing them- 
selves into attitudes of violence. But these men 
took the sea quite quietly, nor could you tell from 
their faces which was rich and which was poor. 

It was not till the ship was out throbbing 
swiftly over the smooth sea and darkness had 
fallen that they began to sing. Then those of 
them who were not working gathered together 
with a stringed instrument forward and sang of 



THE DEPARTURE 263 

pity and of death. One of them said to me, 
^* Knight, can your grace sing ? " I told him that 
I could sing, certainly, but that my singing was 
unpleasing, and that I only knew foreign songs. 
He said that singing was a great solace, and 
desired to hear a song of my own country. So I 
sang them a song out of Sussex, to which they 
listened in deep silence, and when it was con- 
cluded their leader snapped and twanged at the 
strings again and began another song about the 
riding of horses in the hills. 

So we passed the short night until the sky 
upon our quarter grew faintly pale and the little 
wind that rises before morning awakened the sea. 



THE IDEA OF A PILGRIMAGE 

A PILGRIMAGE is, of course, an expedition 
to some venerated place to which a vivid 
memory of sacred things experienced, or a long 
and wonderful history of human experience in 
divine matters, or a personal attraction affecting 
the soul impels one. This is, I say, its essence. 
So a pilgrimage may be made to the tomb of 
Descartes, in Paris, or it may be a little walk 
uphill to a neighbouring and beloved grave, or a 
modern travel, even in luxury, on the impulse to 
see something that greatly calls one. 

But there has always hung round the idea of a 
pilgrimage, with all people and at all times — I 
except those very rare and highly decadent genera- 
tions of history in which no pilgrimages are made, 
nor any journeys, save for curiosity or greed — 
there has always hung round it, I say, something 
more than the mere objective. Just as in general 
worship you will have noble gowns, vivid colour, 
and majestic music (symbols, but necessary 
symbols of the great business you are at) ; so, in 
this particular case of worship, clothes, as it were, 

264 



IDEA OF A PILGRIMAGE 265 

and accoutrements, gather round one's principal 
action. I will visit the grave of a saint or of a 
man whom I venerate privately for his virtues and 
deeds, but on my way I wish to do something a 
little difficult to show at what a price I hold com- 
munion with his resting-place, and also on the way 
I will see all I can of men and things ; for any- 
thing great and worthy is but an ordinary thing 
transfigured, and if I am about to venerate a 
humanity absorbed into the divine, so it behoves 
me on my journey to it to enter into and delight in 
the divine that is hidden in everything. Thus I 
may go upon a pilgrimage with no pack and 
nothing but a stick and my clothes, but I must get 
myself into the frame of mind that carries an in- 
visible burden, an eye for happiness and suffering, 
humour, gladness at the beauty of the world, a 
readiness for raising the heart at the vastness of 
a wide view, and especially a readiness to give 
multitudinous praise to God ; for a man that goes 
on a pilgrimage does best of all if he starts out (I 
say it of his temporal object only) with the heart 
of a wanderer, eager for the world as it is, forget- 
ful of maps or descriptions, but hungry for real 
colours and men and the seeming of things. This 
desire for reality and contact is a kind of humility, 
this pleasure in it a kind of charity. 

It is surely in the essence of a pilgrimage that 
all vain imaginations are controlled by the great- 



266 HILLS AND THE SEA 

ness of our object. Thus, if a man should go to 
see the place where (as they say) St. Peter met our 
Lord on the Appian Way at dawn, he will not care 
very much for the niggling of pedants about this 
or that building, or for the rhetoric of posers about 
this or that beautiful picture. If a thing in his 
way seem to him frankly ugly he will easily treat 
it as a neutral, forget it and pass it by. If, on the 
contrary, he find a beautiful thing, whether done 
by God or by man, he will remember and love it. 
This is what children do, and to get the heart of a 
child is the end surely of any act of religion. In 
such a temper he will observe rather than read, 
and though on his way he cannot do other than 
remember the names of places, saying, ** Why, 
these are the Alps of which I have read ! Here 
is Florence, of which I have heard so many rich 
women talk ! " yet he will never let himself argue 
and decide or put himself, so to speak, before an 
audience in his own mind — for that is pride which 
all of us moderns always fall into. He will, on 
the contrary, go into everything with curiosity 
and pleasure, and be a brother to the streets and 
trees and to all the new world he finds. The Alps 
that he sees with his eyes will be as much more 
than the names he read about, the Florence of his 
desires as much more than the Florence of sickly 
drawing-rooms ; as beauty loved is more than 
beauty heard of, or as our own taste, smell, hearing. 



IDEA OF A PILGRIMAGE 267 

touch and sight are more than the vague relations 
of others. Nor does religion exercise in our 
common life any function more temporarily valu- 
able than this, that it makes us be sure at least 
of realities, and look very much askance at phil- 
osophies and imaginaries and academic whimsies. 
Look, then, how a pilgrimage ought to be 
nothing but a nobler kind of travel, in which, 
according to our age and inclination, we tell our 
tales, or draw our pictures, or compose our songs. 
It is a very great error, and one unknown before 
our most recent corruptions, that the religious 
spirit should be so superficial and so self-conscious 
as to dominate our method of action at special 
times and to be absent at others. It is better oc- 
casionally to travel in one way or another to some 
beloved place (or to some place wonderful and 
desired for its associations), haunted by our mission, 
yet falling into every ordinary levity, than to go 
about a common voyage in a chastened and devout 
spirit. I fear this is bad theology, and I pro- 
pound it subject to authority. But, surely, if a 
man should say, ** I will go to Redditch to buy 
needles cheap," and all the way take care to speak 
no evil of his neighbour, to keep very sober, to be 
punctual in his accounts, and to say his regular 
prayers with exactitude, though that would be a 
good work, yet if he is to be a pilgrim (and th€ 
Church has a hundred gates), I would rather for 



268 HILLS AND THE SEA 

the moment that he went off in a gay, tramping 
spirit, not over-sure of his expenses, not very care- 
ful of all he said or did, but illuminated and in- 
creasingly informed by the great object of his 
voyage, which is here not to buy or sell needles, 
or what not, but to loose the mind and purge it in 
the ultimate contemplation of something divine. 

There is, indeed, that kind of pilgrimage which 
some few sad men undertake because their minds 
are overburdened by a sin or tortured with some 
great care that is not of their own fault. These are 
excepted from the general rule, though even to 
these a very human spirit comes by the way, and 
the adventures of inns and foreign conversations 
broaden the world for them and lighten their 
burden. But this kind of pilgrimage is rare and 
special, having its peculiar virtues. The common 
sort (which how many men undertake under 
another name !) is a separate and human satisfac- 
tion of a need, the fulfilling of an instinct in us, the 
realization of imagined horizons, the reaching of 
a goal. For whoever yet that was alive reached an 
end and could say he was satisfied ? Yet who has 
not desired so to reach an end and to be satisfied ? 
Well, pilgrimage is for the most a sort of pre- 
figuring or rehearsal. A man says: ^^ I will play 
in show (but a show stiffened with a real and just 
object) at that great part which is all we can ever 
play. Here I start from home, and there I reach a 



IDEA OF A PILGRIMAGE 269 

goal, and on the way I laugh and watch, sing and 
work. Now I am at ease and again hampered ; 
now poor, now rich, weary towards the end and at 
last arrived at that end. So my great life is, and 
so this little chapter shall be." Thus he packs up 
the meaning of life into a little space to be able to 
look at it closely, as men carry with them small 
locket portraits of their birthplace or of those they 
love. 

If a pilgrimage is all this, it is evident that, how- 
ever careless, it must not be untroublesome. It 
would be a contradiction of pilgrimage to seek to 
make the journey short and vapid, merely con- 
suming the mind for nothing, as is our modern 
habit ; for they seem to think nowadays that to 
remain as near as possible to what one was at 
starting, and to one's usual rut, is the great good 
of travel (as though a man should run through the 
Iliad only to note the barbarous absurdity of 
the Greek characters, or through Catullus for the 
sake of discovering such words as were like enough 
to English). That is not the spirit of a pilgrimage 
at all. The pilgrim is humble and devout, and 
human, and charitable, and ready to smile and 
admire ; therefore he should comprehend the whole 
of his way, the people in it, and the hills and the 
clouds, and the habits of the various cities. And 
as to the method of doing this, we may go 
bicycling (though that is a little flurried) or driving 



270 HILLS AND THE SEA 

(though that is luxurious and dangerous, because 
it brings us constantly against servants and 
flattery) ; but the best way of all is on foot, where 
one is a man like any other man, with the sky 
above one, and the road beneath, and the world on 
every side, and time to see all. 

So also I designed to walk, and did, when I 
visited the tombs of the Apostles. 



THE ARENA 

IT was in Paris, in his room on the hill of the 
University, that a traveller woke and wondered 
what he should do with his day. In some way — I 
cannot tell how — ephemeral things had captured 
his mind in the few hours he had already spent in 
the city. There is no civilization where the vari- 
ous parts stand so separate as they do with the 
French. You may live in Paris all your life and 
never suspect that there is a garrison of eighty 
thousand men within call. You may spend a year 
in a provincial town and never hear that the large 
building you see daily is a bishop's palace. Or 
you may be the guest of the bishop for a month, 
and remain under the impression that somewhere, 
hidden away in the place, there is a powerful clique 
of governing atheists whom, somehow, you never 
run across. And so this traveller, who knew Paris 
like his pocket, and had known it since he could 
speak plain, had managed to gather up in this 
particular visit all the impressions which are least 
characteristic of the town. He had dined with a 
friend at Pousset's ; he had passed the evening at 
the Exhibition, and he had had a bare touch of the 

271 



272 HILLS AND THE SEA 

real thing in the Rue de Tournon ; but even there 
it was in the company of foreigners. Therefore, I 
repeat, he woke up next morning wondering what 
he should do, for the veneer of Paris is the thin- 
nest in the world, and he had exhausted it in one 
feverish day. 

Luckily for him, the room in which he lay was 
French, and had been French for a hundred years. 
You looked out of window into a sky cut by the 
tall Mansard roofs of the eighteenth century ; and 
over the stones of what had been the Scotch Col- 
lege you could see below you at the foot of the hill 
all the higher points of the island — especially the 
Sainte Chapelle and the vast towers of the cathe- 
dral. Then it suddenly struck him that the air 
was full of bells. Now, it is a curious thing, and 
one that every traveller will bear me out in, that 
you associate a country place with the sound of 
bells, but a capital never. Caen is noisy enough 
and Rouen big enough, one would think, to drown 
the memory of music ; yet any one who has lived 
in his Normandy remembers their perpetual bells; 
and as for the admirable town of Chinon, where 
no one ever goes, I believe it is Ringing Island 
itself. But Paris one never thinks of as a place 
of bells. And yet there are bells enough there 
to take a man right into the past, and from there 
through fairyland to hell and out and back again. 



THE ARENA 273 

If I were writing of the bells, I could make you 
a list of all the famous bells, living and dead, that 
haunt the city, and the tale of what they have 
done would be a history of France. The bell of 
the St. Bartholomew over against the Louvre, the 
tocsin of the Hotel de Ville that rang the knell of 
the Monarchy, the bell of St. Julien that is as old 
as the University, the old Bourdon of Notre Dame 
that first rang when St. Louis brought in the 
crown of thorns, and the peal that saluted Napo- 
leon, and the new Bourdon that is made of the 
guns of Sebastopol, and the Savoyarde up on 
Montmartre, a new bell much larger than the rest. 
This morning the air was full of them. They 
came up to the height on which the traveller lay 
listening ; they came clear and innumerable over 
the distant surge of the streets j he spent an hour 
wondering at such an unusual Parliament and 
General Council of Bells. Then he said to him- 
self: *4t must be some great feast of the Church." 
He was in a world he had never known before. 
He was like a man who gets into a strange country 
in a dream and follows his own imagination in- 
stead of suffering the pressure of outer things ; or 
like a boy who wanders by a known river till he 
comes to unknown gardens. 

So anxious was he to take possession at once of 
this discovery of his that he went off hurriedly 
without eating or drinking, thinking only of what 



274 HILLS AND THE SEA 

he might find. He desired to embrace at one sight 
all that Paris was doing on a day which was full 
of St. Louis and of resurrection. The thoughts 
upon thoughts that flow into the mind from its 
impression, as water creams up out of a stone 
fountain at a river head, disturbed him, swelling 
beyond the possibility of fulfilment. He wished 
to see at once the fashionables in St. Clotilde and 
the Greek Uniates at St. Julien, and the 
empty Sor bonne and the great crowd of boys at 
Stanislas ; but what he was going to see never 
occurred to him, for he thought he knew Paris too 
well to approach the cathedral. 

Notre Dame is jealously set apart for special and 
well-advertised official things. If you know the 
official world you know the great church, and 
unless some great man had died, or some victory 
had been won, you would never go there to see 
how Paris took its religion. No midnight Mass is 
said in it ; for the lovely carols of the Middle Ages 
you must go to St. Gervais, and for the pomp 
of the Counter- Reformation to the Madeleine, 
for soldiers to St. Augustin, for pilgrims to 
St. Etienne. Therefore no one would ever have 
thought of going to the cathedral on this day, 
when an instinct and revelation of Paris at prayer 
filled the mind. Nevertheless, the traveller's feet 
went, of their own accord, towards the seven 
bridges, because the Island draws all Paris to it, 



THE ARENA 275 

and was drawing him along with the rest. He 
had meant perhaps to go the way that all the world 
has gone since men began to live on this river, 
and to follow up the Roman way across the Seine 
— a vague intention of getting a Mass at St. Merry 
or St. Laurent. But he was going as a dream 
sent him, without purpose or direction. 

The sun was already very hot, and the Parvis 
was blinding with light when he crossed the little 
bridge. Then he noticed that the open place had 
dotted about it little groups of people making 
eastward. The Parvis is so large that you could 
have a multitude scattered in it and only notice 
that the square was not deserted. There were no 
more than a thousand, perhaps, going separately 
towards Notre Dame, and a thousand made no 
show in such a square. But when he went in 
through the doors he saw there something he had 
never seen before, and that he thought did not 
exist. It was as though the vague interior visions 
of which the morning had been so full had taken 
on reality. 

You may sometimes see in modern picture 
galleries an attempt to combine the story from 
which proceeds the nourishing flame of Christi- 
anity with the crudities and the shameful ugli- 
ness of our decline. Thus, with others, a picture 
of our Lord and Mary Magdalen ; all the figures 
except that of our Lord were dressed in the 



276 HILLS AND THE SEA 

modern way. I remember another of our Lord 
and the little children, where the scene is put into 
a village school. Now, if you can imagine (which 
it is not easy to do) such an attempt to be successful, 
untouched by the love of display and eccentricity, 
and informing — as it commonly pretends to inform 
— our time with an idea, then you will understand 
what the traveller saw that morning in Notre 
Dame, The church seemed the vastest cavern that 
had ever been built for worship. Coming in from 
the high morning, the half-light alone, with which 
we always connect a certain majesty and presence, 
seemed to have taken on amplitude as well. The 
incense veiled what appeared to be an infinite lift 
of roof, and the third great measurement — the 
length of nave that leads like a forest ride to the 
lights of the choir — was drawn out into an im- 
measurable perspective by reason of a countless 
crowd of men and women divided by the narrow 
path of the procession. So full was this great 
place that a man moved slowly and with difficulty, 
edging through such a mass of folk as you may 
find at holiday time in a railway station, or outside 
a theatre— never surely before was a church like 
this, unless, indeed, some very rich or very 
famous man happened to be gracing it. But here 
to-day, for nothing but the function proper to the 
feast, the cathedral was paved and floored with 
human beings. In the galilee there was a kind of 



THE ARENA 277 

movement so that a man could get up further, and 
at last the traveller found a place to stand in just 
on the edge of the open gangway, at the very end 
of the nave. He peered up this, and saw from the 
further end, near the altar, the head of the proces- 
sion approaching, which was (in his fancy of that 
morning) like the line of the Faith, still living and 
returning in a perpetual circle to revivify the 
world. Moreover, there was in the advent of the 
procession a kind of climax. As it came nearer, 
the great crowd moved more thickly towards it; 
children were lifted up, and by one of Sully's wide 
pillars a group of three young soldiers climbed on 
a rail to see the great sight better. The Cardinal- 
Archbishop, very old, and supported by his 
priests, half walked and half tottered down the 
length of the people ; his head, grown weary with 
age, barely supported the mitre, from which great 
jewels, false or true, were flashing. In his hand 
he had a crozier that was studded in the same way 
with gems, and that seemed to be made of gold ; 
the same hands had twisted the metal of it as 
had hammered the hinges of the cathedral doors. 
Certainly there here appeared one of the resurrec- 
tions of Europe. The matter of life seemed to 
take on a fuller stuff and to lift into a dimension 
above that in which it ordinarily moves. The thin, 
narrow, and unfruitful experience of to-day and 
yesterday was amplified by all the lives that have 



278 HILLS AND THE SEA 

made our life, and the blood of which we are only 
a last expression, the race that is older even than 
Rome seemed in this revelation of continuity to be 
gathered up into one intense and passionate 
moment. The pagan altar of Tiberius, the legend 
of Dionysius, the whole circle of the wars came 
into this one pageant, and the old man in his 
ofBce and his blessing was understood by all the 
crowd before him to transmit the centuries. A 
rich woman thrust a young child forward, and he 
stopped and stooped with difficulty to touch its 
hair. As he approached the traveller it was as 
though there had come great and sudden news to 
him, or the sound of unexpected and absorbing 
music. 

The procession went on and closed ; the High 
Mass followed ; it lasted a very long time, and the 
traveller went out before the crowd had moved and 
found himself again in the glare of the sun on the 
Parvis. He went over the bridge to find his eat- 
ing-shop near the archives, and eat the first food 
of that day, thinking as he went that certainly 
there are an infinity of lives side by side in our 
cities, and each ignores the rest ; and yet, that to 
pass from what we know of these to what we do 
not — though it is the most wonderful journey in 
the world — is one that no one undertakes unless 
accident or a good fortune pushes him on. He 
desired to make another such journey. 



THE ARENA 279 

He came back to find me in London, and spoke 
to me of Paris as of a city newly discovered : as I 
listened I thought I saw an arena. 

In a plain of the north, undistinguished by great 
hills, open to the torment of the sky, the gods had 
traced an arena wherein were to be fought out the 
principal battles of a later age. 



Spirits lower than the divine, spirits intermediate, 
have been imagined by men wiser than ourselves 
to have some power over the world — a power which 
we might vanquish in a special manner, but still 
a power. To such conceptions the best races of 
Europe cling ; upon such a soil are grown the 
legends that tell us most about our dark, and yet 
enormous, human fate. These intermediate spirits 
have been called in all the older creeds ^*the 
gods." It is in the nature of the Church to frown 
upon these dreams ; but I, as I listened to him, saw 
clearly that plain wherein the gods had marked 
out an arena for mankind. 

It was oval, as should be a theatre for any show, 
with heights around it insignificant, but offering 
a vantage ground whence could be watched the 
struggle in the midst. There was a sacred centre 
— an island and a mount — and, within the lines, so 
great a concourse of gladiatorial souls as befits the 
greatest of spectacles. I say, I do not know how 



280 HILLS AND THE SEA 

far such visions are permitted, nor how far the 
right reason of the Church condemns them ; but 
the dream returned to me very powerfully, recall- 
ing my boyhood, when the traveller told me his 
story. I also therefore went and caught the fresh 
gale of the stream of the Seine in flood, and saw 
the many roofs of Paris quite clear after rain, and 
read the writings of the men I mixed with and 
heard the noise of the city. 



It is not upon the paltry level of negations or of 
decent philosophies, it is in the action and hot 
mood of creative certitudes that the French battle 
is engaged. The little sophists are dumb and 
terrified, their books are quite forgotten. I myself 
forgot (in those few days by that water and in that 
city) the thin and ineffectual bodies of ignorant 
men who live quite beyond any knowledge of such 
fires. The printed things which tired and poor 
writers put down for pay no longer even disturbed 
me ; the reflections, the mere phantasms of reality, 
with which in a secluded leisure we please our 
intellect, faded. I was like a man who is in the 
centre of two lines that meet in war ; to such a 
man this fellow's prose on fighting and that one's 
verse, this theory of strategy, or that essay upon 
arms, are not for one moment remembered. Here 
(in the narrow street which I knew and was now 



THE ARENA 281 

following) St. Bernard had upheld the sacrament 
in the shock of the first awakening — in that twelfth 
century, when Julian stirred in his sleep. Beyond 
the bridge, in Roman walls that still stand care- 
fully preserved, the Church of Gaul had sustained 
Athanasius, and determined the course of the 
Christian centuries. I had passed upon my way 
the vast and empty room where had been estab- 
lished the Terror ; where had been forced by an 
angry and compelling force the full return of equal 
laws upon Europe. Who could remember in such 
an air the follies and the pottering of men who 
analyse and put in categories and explain the 
follies of wealth and of old age ? 

Good Lord, how little the academies became ! I 
remembered the phrases upon one side and upon 
the other which still live in the stones of the city, 
carved and deep, but more lasting than are even 
the letters of their inscription. I remembered the 
defiant sentence of Mad Dolet on his statue there 
in the Quarter, the deliberate perversion of Plato, 
**And when you are dead you shall no more be any- 
thing at all." I remembered the **Ave Crux spes 
Unica" ; and St. Just's **The words that we have 
spoken will never be lost on earth"; and Danton's 
** Continual Daring," and the scribbled Greek on 
the walls of the cathedral towers. For not only are 
the air and the voice, but the very material of this 
town is filled with words that remain. Certainly 



282 HILLS AND THE SEA 

the philosophies and the negations dwindled to be 
so small as at last to disappear, and to leave only 
the two antagonists. Passion brooded over the 
silence of the morning ; there was great energy in 
the cool of the spring air, and up above, the forms 
the clouds were taking were forms of gigantic 
powers. 

I came, as the traveller had come, into the 
cathedral. It was not yet within half an hour of 
the feast. There was still room to be found, 
though with every moment the nave and the 
aisles grew fuller, until one doubted how at the 
end so great a throng could be dismissed. They 
were of all kinds. Some few were strangers 
holding in their hands books about the building. 
Some few were devout men on travel, and praying 
at this great office on the way : men from the 
islands, men from the places that Spain has re- 
deemed for the future in the new world. I saw an 
Irishman near me, and two West Indians also, 
half negro, like the third of the kings that came 
to worship at the manger where Our Lord was 
born. For two hours and nearly three I saw and 
wondered at that immense concourse. The tri- 
bunes were full, the whole choir was black, mov- 
ing with the celebrants, and all the church floor 
beyond and around me was covered and dark with 
expectant men. 

The Bourdon that had summoned the traveller 



THE ARENA 283 

and driven mad so many despairs, sounded above 
me upon this day with amplitude and yet with 
menace. The silence was a solace when it ceased 
to boom. The Creed, the oldest of our chaunts, 
filled and completed those walls ; it was as though 
at last a battle had been joined, and in that issue 
a great relief ran through the crowd. 



From such a temple I came out at last. They 
had thrown the western doors wide open, the doors 
whose hinges man scarcely could have hammered 
and to whose miracle legend has lent its aid ; the 
midday, now captured by the sun, came right into 
the hollow simplicity of the nave, and caught the 
river of people as they flowed outwards ; but even 
that and the cry of the Benediction from the altar 
gave no greater peace than an appeal to combat. 
In the air outside that other power stood waiting 
to conquer or to fail. 

I came out, as from a camp, into the civilian 
debate, the atmosphere of the spectators. The 
permanent and toppling influence against which 
this bulwark of ours, the Faith, was reared (as we 
say) by God Himself, shouted in half the prints, in 
half the houses. I sat down to read and compare 
(as it should be one's custom when one is among 
real and determining things) the writings of the 
extreme, that is of the leading men. I chose the 



284 HILLS AND THE SEA 

two pamphleteers who are of equal weight in this 
war, but of whom one only is known as yet to us 
in England, and that the least. 

I read their battle-cries. Their style was excel- 
lent ; their good faith shone even in their style. 

Since I had been upon phrases all these hours 
I separated and remembered the principal words 
of each. One said : ** They will break their teeth 
against it. The Catholic Church is not to perish, 
for she has allies from outside Time." The other 
said : ** How long will the death of this crucified 
god linger ? How long will his agony crush men 
with its despair ? " 

But I read these two writers for my entertain- 
ment only, and in order to be acquainted with 
men around me ; for on the quarrel between them 
I had long ago made up my mind. 



AT THE SIGN OF THE LION 

IT was late, and the day was already falling 
when I came, sitting my horse Monster, to 
a rise of land. We were at a walk, for we had 
gone very far since early morning, and were now 
off the turf upon the hard road ; moreover, the 
hill, though gentle, had been prolonged. From 
its summit I saw before me, as I had seen it a 
hundred times, the whole of the weald. 

But now that landscape was transfigured, be^ 
cause many influences had met to make it, for the 
moment, an enchanted land. The autumn, coming 
late, had crowded it with colours ; a slight mist 
drew out the distances, and along the horizon 
stood out, quite even and grey like mountains, 
the solemn presence of the Downs. Over all this 
the sky was full of storm. 

In some manner which language cannot ex- 
press, and hardly music, the vision was unearthly. 
All the lesser heights of the plain ministered to 
one effect, a picture which was to other pictures 
what the marvellous is to the experience of com- 
mon things. The distant mills, the edges of 
heath and the pine trees, were as though they 

285 



286 HILLS AND THE SEA 

had not before been caught by the eyes of 
travellers, and would not, after the brief space 
of their apparition, be seen again. Here was a 
countryside whose every outline was familiar ; 
and yet it was pervaded by a general quality of 
the uplifted and the strange. And for that one 
hour under the sunset the county did not seem to 
me a thing well known, but rather adored. 

The glow of evening, which had seemed to 
put this horizon into another place and time than 
ours, warned me of darkness ; and I made off the 
road to the right for an inn I knew of, that stands 
close to the upper Arun and is very good. Here an 
old man and his wife live easily, and have so lived 
for at least thirty years, proving how accessible 
is content. Their children are in service beyond 
the boundaries of the county, and are thus pro- 
vided with sufficiency ; and they themselves, the 
old people, enjoy a small possession which at 
least does not diminish, for, thank God, their 
land is free. It is a square of pasture bordered by 
great elms upon three sides of it, but on the 
fourth, towards the water, a line of pollard wil- 
lows ; and off a little way before the house runs 
Arun, sliding as smooth as Mincius, and still so 
young that he can remember the lake in the forest 
where he rose. 

On such ancestral land these two people await 
without anxiety what they believe will be a kindly 



AT THE SIGN OF THE LION 287 

death. Nor is their piety of that violent and 
tortured kind which is associated with fear and with 
distress of earlier life ; but they remain peasants, 
drawing from the earth they have always known 
as much sustenance for the soul as even their 
religion can afford them, and mixing that religion 
so intimately with their experience of the soil 
that, were they not isolated in an evil time, they 
would have set up some shrine about the place to 
sanctify it. 

The passion and the strain which must accom- 
pany (even in the happiest and most secluded) the 
working years of life, have so far disappeared from 
them, that now they can no longer recall any 
circumstances other than those which they enjoy ; 
so that their presence in a room about one, as they 
set food before one or meet one at the door, is in 
itself an influence of peace. 

In such a place, and with such hosts to serve 
him, the wears of the world retire for a little time, 
from an evening to a morning ; and a man can 
enjoy a great refreshment. In such a place he 
will eat strongly and drink largely, and sleep 
well and deeply, and, when he saddles again for 
his journey, he will take the whole world new ; 
nor are those intervals without their future value, 
for the memory of a complete repose is a sort of 
sacrament, and a viaticum for the weary lengths 
of the way. 



288 HILLS AND THE SEA 

The stable of this place is made of oak entirely, 
and, after more than a hundred years, the wood- 
work is still sound, save that the roof now falls in 
waves where the great beams have sagged a little 
under the pressure of the tiles. And these tiles 
are of that old hand-made kind which, whenever 
you find them, you will do well to buy ; for they 
have a slight downward curve to them, and so 
they fit closer and shed the rain better than if they 
were flat. Also they do not slip, and thus they 
put less strain upon the timber. This excellent 
stable has no flooring but a packed layer of chalk 
laid on the ground ; and the wooden manger is all 
polished and shining, where it has been rubbed 
by the noses of ten thousand horses since the 
great war. That polishing was helped, perhaps, 
by the nose of Percy's horse, and perhaps by the 
nose of some wheeler who in his time had dragged 
the guns back aboard, retreating through the 
night after Corunna. It is in every way a stable 
that a small peasant should put up for himself, 
without seeking money from other men. It is, 
therefore, a stable which your gaping scientists 
would condemn ; and though as yet they have 
not got their ugly hands upon the dwellings of 
beasts as they have upon those of men, yet I often 
fear for this stable, and am always glad when I 
come back and find it there. For the men who 
make our laws are the same as those that sell us 



AT THE SIGN OF THE LION 289 

our bricks and our land and our metals ; and 
they make the laws so that rebuilding shall go on : 
and vile rebuilding too. 

Anyhow, this stable yet stands ; and in none 
does the horse, Monster, take a greater delight, for 
he also is open to the influence of holiness. So I 
led him in, and tied him by the ancient headstall, 
and I rubbed him down, and I washed his feet and 
covered him with the rough rug that lay there. 
And when I had done all that, I got him oats from 
the neighbouring bin ; for the place knew me well, 
and I could always tend to my own beast when 
I came there. And as he ate his oats, I said to 
him : ** Monster, my horse, is there any place on 
earth where a man, even for a little time, can be 
as happy as the brutes ? If there is, it is here at 
the Sign of The Lion." And Monster answered : 
** There is a tradition among us that, of all 
creatures that creep upon the earth, man is the 
fullest of sorrow." 

I left him then, and went towards the house. 
It was quite dark, and the windows, with their 
square, large panes and true proportions, shone 
out and made it home. The room within received 
me like a friend. The open chimney at its end, 
round which the house is built, was filled with 
beech logs burning ; and the candles, which were 
set in brass, mixed their yellow light with that of 
the fire. The long ceiling was low, as are the 
u 



290 HILLS AND THE SEA 

ceilings of Heaven. And oak was here every- 
where also : in the beams and the shelves and the 
mighty table. For oak was, and will be again, 
the chief wood of the weald. 

When they put food and ale before me, it was 
of the kind which has been English ever since 
England began, and which perhaps good fortune 
will preserve over the breakdown of our genera- 
tion, until we have England back again. One 
could see the hops in the tankard, and one could 
taste the barley, until, more and more sunk into 
the plenitude of this good house, one could dare 
to contemplate, as though from a distant stand- 
point, the corruption and the imminent danger of 
the time through which we must lead our lives. 
And, as I so considered the ruin of the great 
cities and their slime, I felt as though I were in 
a sort of fortress of virtue and of health, which 
could hold out through the pressure of the war. 
And I thought to myself: ^'Perhaps even before 
our children are men, these parts which survive 
from a better order will be accepted as models, 
and England will be built again." 

This fantasy had not time, tenuous as it was, 
to disappear, before there came into that room a 
man whose gesture and bearing promised him to 
be an excellent companion, but in whose eyes 
I also perceived some light not ordinary. He 
was of middle age, fifty or more ; his hair was 



AT THE SIGN OF THE LION 291 

crisp and grey, his face brown, as though he had 
been much upon the sea. He was tall in stature, 
and of some strength. He saluted me, and, when 
he had eaten, asked me if I also were familiar 
with this inn. 

*'Very familiar," I said; *'and since I can enter 
it at any hour freely, it is now more familiar to me 
even than the houses that were once my homes. 
For nowadays we, we who work in the State and 
are not idle, must be driven from one place to 
another ; and only the very rich have certitude 
and continuity. But to them it is of no service ; 
for they are too idle to take root in the soil." 

**Yet I was of their blood," he said; **and 
there is in this county a home which should be 
mine. But nothing to-day is capable of endur- 
ance. I have not seen my home (though it is but 
ten miles from here) since I left it in my thirtieth 
year ; and I too would rather come to this inn, 
which I know as you know it, than to any house 
in England ; because I am certain of entry, and 
because I know what I shall find, and because 
what I find is what any man of this county should 
find, if the soul of it is not to disappear." 

** You, then," I answered (we were now seated 
side by side before the fire with but one flickering 
candle behind us, and on the floor between us 
a port just younger than the host), **you, then, 
come here for much the same reason as do I ? " 



292 HILLS AND THE SEA 

^*And what is that?" said he. 

**Why/' said I, **to enjoy the illusion that 
Change can somewhere be arrested, and that, in 
some shape, a part at least of the things we love 
remains. For, since I was a boy and almost since 
I can remember, everything in this house has been 
the same; and here I escape from the threats of 
the society we know." 

When I had said this, he was grave and silent 
for a little while ; and then he answered : 

**It is impossible, I think, after many years to 
recover any such illusion. Just as a young man 
can no longer think himself (as children do) the 
actor in any drama of his own choosing, so a man 
growing old (as am I) can no longer expect of any 
society — and least of all of his own — the gladness 
that comes from an illusion of permanence." 

^*For my part," I answered in turn, ^^ I know 
very well, though I can conjure up this feeling of 
security, that it is very flimsy stuff; and I take it 
rather as men take symbols. For though these 
good people will at last perish, and some brewer — 
a Colonel of Volunteers as like as not — will buy 
this little field, and though for the port we are 
drinking there will be imperial port, and for the 
beer we have just drunk something as noisome as 
that port, and though thistles will grow up in the 
good pasture ground, and though, in a word, this 
inn will become a hotel and will perish, neverthe- 



AT THE SIGN OF THE LION 293 

less I cannot but believe that England remains, 
and I do not think it the taking of a drug or a 
deliberate cheating of oneself to come and steep 
one's soul in what has already endured so long 
because it was proper to our country." 

*^A11 that you say,'' he answered, **is but part 
of the attempt to escape Necessity. Your very 
frame is of that substance for which permanence 
means death ; and every one of all the emotions 
that you know is of its nature momentary, and 
must be so if it is to be alive. 

**Yet there is a divine thirst," I said, ** for some- 
thing that will not so perish. If there were no 
such thirst, why should you and I debate such 
things, or come here to The Lion either of us, to 
taste antiquity ? And if that thirst is there, it is a 
proof that there is for us some End and some such 
satisfaction. For my part, as I know of nothing 
else, I cannot but seek it in this visible good 
world. I seek it in Sussex, in the nature of my 
home, and in the tradition of my blood." 

But he answered: **No; it is not thus to be 
attained, the end of which you speak. And that 
thirst, which surely is divine, is to be quenched in 
no stream that we can find by journeying, not 
even in the little rivers that run here under the 
combes of home." 

Myself: **Well, then, what is the End?" 

He: '*I have sometimes seen it clearly, that 



294 HILLS AND THE SEA 

when the disappointed quest was over, all this 
journeying would turn out to be but the beginning 
of a much greater adventure, and that I should set 
out towards another place where every sense should 
be fulfilled, and where the fear of mutation should 
be set at rest.'* 

Myself: ** No one denies that such a picture in 
the mind haunts men their whole lives through, 
though, after they have once experienced loss and 
incompletion, and especially when they have 
caught sight a long way off of the Barrier which 
ends all our experience, they recognize that picture 
for a cheat ; and surely nothing can save it? That 
which reasons in us may be absolute and undying; 
for it is outside Time. It escapes the gropings of 
the learned, and it has nothing to do with material 
things. But as for all those functions which we 
but half fulfil in life, surely elsewhere they cannot 
be fulfilled at all ? Colour is for the eyes and music 
is for the ears ; and all that we love so much comes 
in by channels that do not remain." 

He: *'Yet the Desire can only be for things 
that we have known ; and the Desire, as you have 
said, is a proof of the thing desired, and, but for 
these things which we know, the words *joy ' and 
* contentment ' and * fulfilment ' would have no 
meaning." 

Myself: '*Why yes; but, though desires are 
the strongest evidence of truth, yet there is also 



AT THE SIGN OF THE LION 295 

desire for illusions, as there is a waking demand 
for things attainable, and a demand in dreams for 
things fantastic and unreal. Every analogy in- 
creasingly persuades us, and so does the whole 
scheme of things as we learn it, that, with our 
passing, there shall also pass speech and comfort- 
able fires and fields and the voices of our children, 
and that, when they pass, we lose them for ever." 
He: **Yet these things would not be, but for 
the mind which receives them ; and how can we 
make sure what channels are necessary for the 
mind? and may not the mind stretch on? And 
you, since you reject my guess at what may be 
reserved for us, tell me, what is the End which we 
shall attain?" 

Myself : ^^ Salva fide^ I cannot tell." 
Then he continued and said : ** I have too long 
considered these matters for any opposition 
between one experience and another to affect my 
spirit, and I know that a long and careful inquiry 
into any matter must lead the same man to 
opposing conclusions ; but, for my part, I shall 
confidently expect throughout that old age, which 
is not far from me, that, when it ceases, I shall find 
beyond it things similar to those which I have 
known. For all I here enjoy is of one nature ; 
and if the life of a man be bereft of them at last, 
then it is falsehood or metaphor to use the word 
* eternal.'" 



296 HILLS AND THE SEA 

** You think, then," said I, "that some immortal 
part in us is concerned not only with our know- 
ledge, but with our every feeling, and that our 
final satisfaction will include a sensual pleasure : 
fragrance, and landscape, and a visible home that 
shall be dearer even than are these dear hills ? " 

** Something of the sort," he said, and slightly 
shrugged his shoulders. They were broad, as he 
sat beside me staring at the fire. They conveyed 
in their attitude that effect of mingled strength 
and weariness which is common to all who have 
travelled far and with great purpose, perpetually 
seeking some worthy thing which they could never 
find. 

The fire had fallen. Flames no longer leapt 
from the beech logs ; but on their under side, 
where a glow still lingered, embers fell. 



THE AUTUMN 
AND THE FALL OF LEAVES 

IT is not true that the close of a life which ends 
in a natural fashion—life which is permitted to 
put on the pomp of death and to go out in glory — 
inclines the mind to repose. It is not true of a day 
ending nor the passing of the year, nor of the fall 
of leaves. Whatever permanent, uneasy question 
is native to men, comes forward most insistent and 
most loud at such times* 

There is a house in my own county which is 
built of stone, whose gardens are fitted to the 
autumn. It has level alleys standing high and 
banked with stone. Their ornaments were carved 
under the influence of that restraint which marked 
the Stuarts. They stand above old ponds, and 
are strewn at this moment with the leaves of elms. 
These walks are like the Mailles of the Flemish 
cities, the walls of the French towns or the terraces 
of the Loire. They are enjoyed to-day by who- 
ever has seen all our time go racing by ; they are 
the proper resting-places of the aged, and their 
spirit is felt especially in the fall of leaves, 

297 



298 HILLS AND THE SEA 

At this season a sky which is of so delicate and 
faint a blue as to contain something of gentle 
mockery, and certainly more of tenderness, pre- 
sides at the fall of leaves. There is no air, no 
breath at all. The leaves are so light that they 
sidle on their going downward, hesitating in that 
which is not void to them, and touching at last so 
imperceptibly the earth with which they are to 
mingle, that the gesture is much gentler than a 
salutation, and even more discreet than a discreet 
caress. 

They make a little sound, less than the 
least of sounds. No bird at night in the marshes 
rustles so slightly ; no men, though men are the 
subtlest of living beings, put so evanescent a stress 
upon their sacred whispers or their prayers. The 
leaves are hardly heard, but they are heard just so 
much that men also, who are destined at the end to 
grow glorious and to die, look up and hear them 
falling. 

• ■ • • • • 

With what a pageantry of every sort is not that 
troubling symbol surrounded ! The scent of life 
is never fuller in the woods than now, for the 
ground is yielding up its memories. The spring 
when it comes will not restore this fullness, nor 
these deep and ample recollections of the earth. 
For the earth seems now to remember the drive 
of the ploughshare and its harrying ; the seed. 



THE FALL OF LEAVES 299 

and the full bursting of it, the swelling and the 
completion of the harvest. Up to the edge of the 
woods throughout the weald the earth has borne 
fruit ; the barns are full, and the wheat is standing 
stacked in the fields, and there are orchards all 
around. It is upon such a mood of parentage and 
of fruition that the dead leaves fall. ^ ^ 

Their colour is not a mere splendour: it is 
intricate. The same unbounded power, never at 
fault and never in calculation, which comprehends 
all the landscape, and which has made the woods, 
has worked in each one separate leaf as well ; they 
are inconceivably varied. Take up one leaf and 
see. How many kinds of boundary are there here 
between the stain which ends in a sharp edge 
against the gold, and the sweep in which the 
purple and red mingle more evenly than they do in 
shot-silk or in flames? Nor are the boundaries to 
be measured only by degrees of definition. They 
have also their characters of line. Here in this leaf 
are boundaries intermittent, boundaries rugged, 
boundaries curved, and boundaries broken. Nor 
do shape and definition even begin to exhaust the 
list. For there are softness and hardness too: 
the agreement and disagreement with the scheme 
of veins ; the grotesque and the simple in line ; the 
sharp and the broad, the smooth, and raised in 
boundaries. So in this one matter of boundaries 
might you discover for ever new things ; there is 



300 HILLS AND THE SEA 

no end to them. Their qualities are infinite. 
And beside boundaries you have hues and tints, 
shades also, varying thicknesses of stuff, and end- 
less choice of surface; that list also is infinite, and 
the divisions of each item in it are infinite; nor is it 
of any use to analyse the thing, for everywhere the 
depth and the meaning of so much creation are be- 
yond our powers. And all this is true of but one 
dead leaf ; and yet every dead leaf will differ from its 
fellow. 

That which has delighted to excel in boundless- 
ness within the bounds of this one leaf, has also 
transformed the whole forest. There is no number 
to the particular colours of the one leaf. This 
forest is like a thing so changeful of its nature 
that change clings to it as a quality, apparent even 
during the glance of a moment. This forest makes 
a picture which is designed, but not seizable. It 
is a scheme, but a scheme you cannot set down. 
It is of those things which can best be retained by 
mere copying with a pencil or a brush. It is of 
those things which a man cannot fully receive, 
and which he cannot fully re-express to other 
men. 

It is no wonder, then, that at this peculiar time, 
this week (or moment) of the year, the desires 
which if they do not prove at least demand — per- 
haps remember — our destiny, come strongest. 
They are proper to the time of autumn, and all 



THE FALL OF LEAVES 801 

men feel them. The air is at once new and old ; 
the morning (if one rises early enough to welcome 
its leisurely advance) contains something in it of 
profound reminiscence. The evenings hardly yet 
suggest (as they soon will) friends and security, 
and the fires of home. The thoughts awakened in 
us by their bands of light fading along the downs 
are thoughts which go with loneliness and prepare 
me for the isolation of the soul. 

It is on this account that tradition has set, at the 
entering of autumn, for a watch at the gate of the 
season, the Archangel ; and at its close the day 
and the night of All-Hallows on which the dead 
return. 



THE GOOD WOMAN 

UPON a hill that overlooks a western plain 
and is conspicuous at the approach of even- 
ing, there still stands a house of faded brick faced 
with cornerings of stone. It is quite empty, but 
yet not deserted. In each room some little furni- 
ture remains ; all the pictures are upon the walls ; 
the deep red damask of the panels is not faded, or 
if faded, shows no contrast of brighter patches, for 
nothing has been removed from the walls. Here 
it is possible to linger for many hours alone, and 
to watch the slope of the hill under the level light 
as the sun descends. Here passed a woman of 
such nobility that, though she is dead, the land- 
scape and the vines are hers. 

It was in September, during a silence of the air, 
that I first saw her as she moved among her pos- 
sessions ; she was smiling to herself as though at 
a memory, but her smile was so slight and so dig- 
nified, so genial, and yet so restrained, that you 
would have thought it part of everything around 
and married (as she was) to the land which was 
now her own. She wandered down the garden 

302 



THE GOOD WOMAN 303 

paths ruling the flowers upon either side, and 
receiving as she went autumn and the fruition of 
her fields ; plenitude and completion surrounded 
her ; the benediction of Almighty God must have 
been upon her, for she was the fulfilment of her 
world. 

Three fountains played in that garden — two, 
next to the northern and the southern walls, were 
small and low ; they rather flowed than rose. 
Two cones of marble received their fall, and over 
these they spread in an even sheet with little noise, 
making (as it were) a sheath of water which 
covered all the stone ; but the third sprang into 
the air with delicate triumph, fine and high, satis- 
fied, tenous and exultant. This one tossed its 
summit into the light, and, alone of the things in 
the garden, the plash of its waters recalled and 
suggested activity — though that in so discreet a 
way that it was to be heard rather than regarded. 
The birds flew far off in circles over the roofs of 
the town below us. Very soon they went to their 
rest. 

The slow transfiguration of the light by which 
the air became full of colours and every outline 
merged into the evening, made of all I saw, as I 
came up towards her, a soft and united vision 
wherein her advancing figure stood up central and 
gave a meaning to the whole. I will not swear 
that she did not as she came bestow as w^ell as 



304 HILLS AND THE SEA 

receive an influence of the sunset. It was said by 
the ancients that virtue is active, an agent, and has 
power to control created things ; for, they said, it 
is in a direct relation with whatever orders and has 
ordained the general scheme. Such power, per- 
haps, resided in her hands. It would have awed 
me but hardly astonished if, as the twilight 
deepened, the inclination of the stems had obeyed 
her gesture and she had put the place to sleep. 

As I came near I saw her plainly. Her face was 
young although she was so wise, but its youth had 
the aspect of a divine survival. Time adorned it. 

Music survives. Whatever is eternal in the 
grace of simple airs or in the Christian innocence 
of Mozart was apparent, nay, had increased, in 
her features as the days in passing had added to 
them not only experience but also revelation and 
security. She was serene. The posture of her 
head was high, and her body, which was visibly 
informed by an immortal spirit, had in its carriage 
a large, a regal, an uplifted bearing which even 
now as I write of it, after so many years, turns 
common every other sight that has encountered 
me» This was the way in which I first saw her 
upon her own hillside at evening. 

With every season I returned. And with every 
season she greeted my coming with a more 
generous and a more vivacious air. I think the 
years slipped off and did not add themselves upon 



THE GOOD WOMAN 305 

her mind : the common doom of mortality escaped 
her until, perhaps, its sign was imposed upon her 
hair — for this at last was touched all through with 
that appearance or gleam which might be morning 
or which might be snow. 

She was able to conjure all evil. Those despe- 
rate enemies of mankind which lie in siege of us 
all around grew feeble and were silent when she 
came. Nor has any other force than hers dared to 
enter the rooms where she had lived : it is her 
influence alone which inhabits them to-day. 
There is a vessel of copper, enamelled in green 
and gilded, which she gave with her own hands 
to a friend overseas. I have twice touched it in 
an evil hour. 

Strength, sustenance, and a sacramental justice 
are permanent in such lives, and such lives also 
attain before their close to so general a survey of 
the world that their appreciations are at once 
accurate and universal. 

On this account she did not fail in any human 
conversation, nor was she ever for a moment less 
than herself; but always and throughout her 
moods her laughter was unexpected and full, her 
fear natural, her indignation glorious. 

Above all, her charity extended like a breeze : it 
enveloped everything she knew. The sense of 
destiny faded from me as the warmth of that 
charity fell upon my soul ; the foreknowledge of 



306 HILLS AND THE SEA 

death retreated, as did every other unworthy 
panic. 

She drew the objects of her friendship into 
something new; they breathed an air from another 
country, so that those whom she deigned to regard 
were, compared with other men, like the living 
compared with the dead ; or, better still, they were 
like men awake while the rest were tortured by 
dreams and haunted of the unreal. Indeed, she 
had a word given to her which saved all the souls 
of her acquaintance. 

It is not true that influence of this sort decays 
or passes into vaguer and vaguer depths of mem- 
mory. It does not dissipate. It is not dissolved. 
It does not only spread and broaden : it also in- 
creases with the passage of time. The musicians 
bequeath their spirit, notably those who have loved 
delightful themes and easy melodies. The poets 
are read for ever ; but those who resemble her do 
more, for they grow out upon the centuries — they 
themselves and not their arts continue. There is 
stuff in their legend. They are a tangible inherit- 
ance for the hurrying generations of men. 

She was of this kind. She was certainly of this 
kind. She died upon this day* in the year 1892. 
In these lines I perpetuate her memory. 

* 22 December. 



THE HARBOUR IN THE NORTH 

UPON that shore of Europe which looks out 
towards no further shore, I came once by 
accident upon a certain man. 

The day had been warm and almost calm, but a 
little breeze from the south-east had all day long 
given life to the sea. The seas had run very small 
and brilliant, yet without violence, before the wind, 
and had broken upon the granite cliffs to leeward, 
not in spouts of foam, but in a white, even line 
that was thin, and from which one heard no 
sound of surge. Moreover, as I was running 
dead north along the coast, the noise about the 
bows was very slight and pleasant. The regular 
and gentle wind came upon the quarter without 
change, and the heel of the boat was steady. 
No calm came with the late sunset ; the breeze 
still held, and so till nearly midnight I could hold 
a course and hardly feel the pulling of the helm. 
Meanwhile the arch of the sunset endured, for I 
was far to the northward, and all those colours 
which belong to June above the Arctic Sea shone 
and changed in the slow progress of that arch as 

307 



308 HILLS AND THE SEA 

it advanced before me and mingled at last with 
the dawn. Throughout the hours of that journey 
I could see clearly the seams of the deck forward, 
the texture of the canvas and the natural hues of 
the woodwork and the rigging, the glint of the 
brasswork, and even the letters painted round the 
little capstan-head, so continually did the light 
endure. The silence which properly belongs to 
darkness, and which accompanies the sleep of 
birds upon the sea, appeared to be the more 
intense because of such a continuance of the 
light, and what with a long vigil and new water, 
it was as though I had passed the edge of all 
known maps and had crossed the boundary of new 
land. 

In such a mood I saw before me the dark band 
of a stone jetty running some miles off from the 
shore into the sea, and at the end of it a fixed 
beacon whose gleam showed against the trans- 
lucent sky (and its broken reflection in the pale 
sea) as a candle shows when one pulls the curtains 
of one's room and lets in the beginnings of the 
day. 

For this point I ran, and as I turned it I dis- 
covered a little harbour quite silent under the 
growing light ; there was not a man upon its 
wharves, and there was no smoke rising from its 
slate roofs. It was absolutely still. The boat 
swung easily round in the calm water, the pier- 



HARBOUR IN THE NORTH 309 

head slipped by, the screen of the pier-head beacon 
suddenly cut off its glare, and she went slowly 
with no air in her canvas towards the patch of dark- 
ness under the quay. There, as I did not know 
the place, I would not pick up moorings which 
another man might own and need, but, as my boat 
still crept along with what was left of her way I 
let go the little anchor, for it was within an hour 
of low tide, and I was sure of water. 

When I had done this she soon tugged at the 
chain and I slackened all the halyards. I put the 
cover on the mainsail, and as I did so, looking aft, 
I noted the high mountain-side behind the town 
standing clear in the dawn. I turned eastward to 
receive it. The light still lifted, and though I had 
not slept I could not but stay up and watch the 
glory growing over heaven. It was just then, when 
I had stowed everything away, that I heard to the 
right of me the crooning of a man. 

A few moments before I should not have seen 
him under the darkness of the sea-wall, but the 
light was so largely advanced (it was nearly two 
o'clock) that I now clearly made out both his craft 
and him. 

She was sturdy and high, and I should think of 
slight draught. She was of great beam. She 
carried but one sail, and that was brown. He had 
it loose, with the peak dipped ready for hoisting, 
and he himself was busy at some work upon her 



310 HILLS AND THE SEA 

floor, stowing and fitting his bundles, and as he 
worked he crooned gently to himself. It was then 
that I hailed him, but in a low voice, so much did 
the silence of that place impress itself upon all 
living beings who were strange to it. He looked 
up and told me that he had not seen me come in 
nor heard the rattling of the chain. I asked him 
what he would do so early, whether he was off 
fishing at that hour or whether he was taking 
parcels down the coast for hire or goods to sell at 
some other port. He answered me that he was 
doing none of those things. 

** What cruise, then, are you about to take?" I 
said. ^* 

**I am off," he answered in a low and happy 
voice, ^*to find what is beyond the sea." 

** And to what shore," said I, **do you mean to 
sail?" 

He answered : ^* I am out upon this sea north- 
ward to where they say there is no further shore." 

As he spoke he looked towards that horizon 
which now stood quite clean and clear between the 
pier-heads : his eyes were full of the broad day- 
light, and he breathed the rising wind as though 
it were a promise of new life and of unexpected 
things. I asked him then what his security was 
and had he formed a plan, and why he was setting 
out from this small place, unless, perhaps, it was 
his home, of which he might be tired. 



HARBOUR IN THE NORTH 311 

**No," he answered, and smiled; ^Hhis is not 
my home ; and I have come to it as you may have 
come to it, for the first time; and, like you, I came 
in after the whole place slept ; but as I neared I 
noticed certain shuremarks and signs which had 
been given me, and then I knew that I had come 
to the starting-place of a long voyage." 

*^ Of what voyage? " I asked. 

He answered : 

**This is that harbour in the North of which a 
Breton priest once told me that I should reach it, 
and when I had moored in it and laid my stores 
on board in order, I should set sail before morn- 
ing and reach at last a complete repose." Then 
he went on with eagerness, though still talking 
low : ** The voyage which I was born to make in 
the end, and to which my desire has driven me, is 
towards a place in which everything we have 
known is forgotten, except those things which, as 
we knew them, reminded us of an original joy. 
In that place I shall discover again such full 
moments of content as I have known, and I shall 
preserve them without failing. It is in some 
country beyond this sea, and it has a harbour like 
this harbour, only set towards the South, as this 
is towards the North; but like this harbour it 
looks out over an unknown sea, and like this 
harbour it enjoys a perpetual light. Of what the 
happy people in this country are, or of how they 



312 HILLS AND THE SEA 

speak, no one has told me, but they will receive 
me well, for I am of one kind with themselves. 
But as to how I shall know this harbour, I can tell 
you : there is a range of hills, broken by a valley 
through which one sees a further and a higher 
range, and steering for this hollow in the hills one 
sees a tower out to sea upon a rock, and high up 
inland a white quarry on a hill-top ; and these two 
in line are the leading marks by which one gets 
clear into the mouth of the river, and so to the 
wharves of the town. And there," he ended, **I 
shall come off the sea for ever, and every one will 
call me by my name," 

The sun was now near the horizon, but not yet 
risen, and for a little time he said nothing to me 
nor I to him, for he was at work sweating up the 
halyard and setting the peak. He let go the 
mooring knot also, but he held the end of the rope 
in his hand and paid it out, standing and looking 
upward, as the sail slowly filled and his craft 
drifted towards me. He pressed the tiller with 
his knee to keep her full. 

I now knew by his eyes and voice that he was 
from the West, and I could not see him leave me 
without asking him from what place he came that 
he should set out for such another place. So I 
asked him; *'Are you from Ireland, or from 
Brittany, or from the Islands ? " He answered me : 
** I am from none of these, but from Cornwall." 



HARBOUR IN THE NORTH 318 

And as he answered me thus shortly he still 
watched the sail and still pressed the tiller with his 
knee, and still paid out the mooring rope without 
turning round. 

*^ You cannot make the harbour," I said to him. 
** It is not of this world." 

Just at that moment the breeze caught the peak 
of his jolly brown sail ; he dropped the tail of the 
rope : it slipped and splashed into the harbour 
slime. His large boat heeled, shot up, just missed 
my cable ; and then he let her go free, and she 
ran clear away. As she ran he looked over his 
shoulder and laughed most cheerily ; he greeted 
me with his eyes, and he waved his hand to me in 
the morning light. 

He held her well. A clean wake ran behind her. 
He put her straight for the harbour-mouth and 
passed the pier-heads and took the sea outside. 

Whether in honest truth he was a fisherman out 
for fishes who chose to fence with me, or whether 
in that cruise of his he landed up in a Norwegian 
bay, or thought better of it in Orkney, or went 
through the sea and through death to the place he 
desired, I have never known. 

I watched him holding on, and certainly he kept 
a course. The sun rose, the town awoke, but I 
would not cease from watching him. His sail 
still showed a smaller and a smaller point upon 
the sea ; he did not waver. For an hour I caught 



314 HILLS AND THE SEA 

it and lost it, and caught it again, as it dwindled ; 
for half another hour I could not swear to it in the 
blaze. Before I had wearied it was gone. 

Oh ! my companions, both you to whom I dedi- 
cate this book and you who have accompanied me 
over other hills and across other waters or before the 
guns in Burgundy, or you others who were with 
me when I seemed alone — that ulterior shore was 
the place we were seeking in every cruise and 
march and the place we thought at last to see. 
We, too, had in mind that Town of which this 
man spoke to me in the Scottish harbour before 
he sailed out northward to find what he could 
find. But I did not follow him, for even if I had 
followed him I should not have found the Town. 



t ^58je 



